In Hebrew, the word is קהילה. It means community. In the more than hundred years this congregation has existed, much has changed. We have gone from Orthodox to Conservative to God-knows-what. Our method of Shabbat observance is totally altered. Our standards of kashrut are looser and our attitude toward interfaith marriage has undergone a complete reversal. I view all of these changes as good. And I view them that way because they have preserved Beth Israel’s most important function: as a קהילה - a community.
Last year on this day, we unveiled plans to rebuild this synagogue of ours. My cousin Jay’s model - now on display in our lobby - inspires our members to work toward its realization, and speaks to potential members of our hopes and dreams. What remains is to instill in all of us not merely the beauty of our vision, but its importance as well. That importance rests in our being a community.
Each of us needs a community: a place where we can stand face-to-face, arm-in-arm, and hand-to-hand with others who share our journey. Beth Israel is such a community. And to watch it work - as I am privileged to do - is an inspiration. I see how the groups that make up our community - our children, our parents, our empty-nesters and our elders - each play a different yet vital role in the lives of all the others. Growing through these roles becomes an ongoing source of purpose and fulfillment that graces our days with meaning.
For those of us who did not grow up among the proliferating forms of social media - Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and the rest - the idea of a virtual community is a contradiction in terms. To us, physical presence is what makes a community a community. We know how hard it is to be physically present in someone’s life - especially when that someone is sick or scared or grieving. Yet knowing how important that presence is in precisely in those moments, we face our own fears and show up anyway. In doing so, we comfort others, and strengthen ourselves.
I worry that our younger generation, for whom the virtual world is native ground, are not being pushed to learn how to be present in the lives of others. And this is where I think that the importance of what we do here rises to the beauty of the physical space to which we aspire.
This past Spring, I met with some of our parents to brainstorm ways in which I could broaden the exposure of the school and the shul to the unaffiliated Jewish community in Wallingford and beyond. One of our parents, Lauren Esposito, told me that she and her daughter Galina spend a lot of time in the public library and suggested that I look into doing some kind of programming there. Perhaps something on parenting, and she recommended a book that I might want to look at.
The book is entitled The Blessing of a Skinned Knee: Using Jewish Teachings To Raise Self-Reliant Children by Dr. Wendy Mogel. For fifteen year Dr. Mogel was a practicing child psychologist dealing with troubled children and, to a large extent, their equally troubled parents. Then she had two kids of her own and, between parenthood, marriage and career, she found herself frenzied and exhausted. A chance invitation to join a friend for Rosh Hashanah services at a nearby shul turned her life around. Convinced from childhood that she didn’t like synagogues and didn’t like rabbis, she couldn’t believe that the service moved her to tears. She returned on Yom Kippur. And then she started attending Friday night services. And then she and her family started lighting candles on Shabbat. And eating dinner in. And avoiding shell-fish. Some time later she decided to take a year off from work to explore her Judaism in depth. These studies would coalesce into a theory of child rearing drawn from Jewish practice and Jewish ethics.
The book’s title provides a beautiful understanding of the most common of childhood experiences. The skinned knee is a blessing when it teaches our children a degree of personal strength and courage. Dr. Mogel draws a parallel between this common childhood trauma and God’s call to Abraham to leave behind everything he knew to pursue his mission in life. “Unless your child ventures forth into the world,” she writes, “he won’t get a chance to learn how to master it and find his place.”
This is but one of the many lessons Dr. Mogel believes Judaism teaches us about raising children. In the Torah’s command to honor one’s father and mother she sees the need to provide our children with role models and the expectation that they will treat their elders with respect. In Judaism’s teachings on the human struggle between our good and bad inclinations, the יצר טוב and the יצר הרע, she sees the need to teach our children the difference between what we need and what we want - cultivating a sense of gratitude toward the one and blessing toward the other. In Judaism’s laws of kashrut and its many blessings over food she sees the opportunity to raise our children’s consciousness about what they eat and encourage moderation. And in Judaism’s sanctification of time she sees an opportunity for family members to slow down and be present in each other’s lives.
In relying as she does on religious teachings, Dr. Mogel rediscovers, I believe, some essential truths about parenting. Looking back at our own skinned knees - which my brother Jay and I earned together trying to jointly coast a tricycle down Saddle Ridge Road’s steep and curvy hill - I suppose we did learn something about carrying on in adversity. But while I agree with most of the lessons she draws about child rearing, I feel she has missed the larger context into which they are intended to fit. The problem is evident in her subtitle: Using Jewish Teachings to Raise Self-Reliant Children. Ultimately, the purpose of Jewish teachings is not to raise self-reliant children; it is to raise Jews, and Jews have a very different take on self-reliance. As I got deeper into the book, I had the increasing feeling that something was missing. Where was the synagogue? Where was the community?
My answer came four pages from the end of the book. Here is what she writes:
(D)espite the fact that bringing Judaism into my life has yielded astonishing blessings, I have not achieved unambivalent enthusiasm for organized religion. I still carry baggage. It bears the labels “Dislikes being part of a group,” “Squirms when sincerity verges near the corny,” and “Finds getting through the day hard enough hard enough without extra restrictions or obligations.” Sometimes the goodness of the congregants at my synagogue makes me feel venal, cynical and selfish by comparison. Sometimes the idea of ritual and religious obligation annoys or exhausts me.
I am sympathetic to Dr. Mogel’s plight and to the baggage that weighs her down. But if her much desired self-reliance has left her unable to cope with others’ emotions or her own sense of ritual inadequacy, what is its point? The truth is, for Judaism, the idea of “self-reliance” makes no more sense than that of “virtual community.” Judaism emphasizes personal responsibility and moral accountability and it does so precisely because it recognizes that we all need each other. Judaism is not about living alone. The divine covenant - membership in which is what makes us Jews - is not between God and each of us, but between God and all of us. It is between God and the entire nation of Israel. The bulk of Judaism’s laws that remain operative since the destruction of the Temple deal with relationships between and among people. As it happens, these are the lessons our kids need the most today, for reasons having to do mostly with a three-by-five rectangle of glass and metal we implant in their hands right around the time they hit adolescence.
Dr. Jean Twenge has dedicated her twenty-five year career in psychology to studying the changes among the generations. Using data that have been collected on teenagers since the 1930’s, she has been able to monitor differences in such things as self-perception and social interaction. Generally, these differences have expressed themselves as gradual changes from year-to-year. Then, beginning in 2012, they became large and abrupt. Not coincidentally, 2012 was the year that smartphone ownership crossed 50% of the US population.
Some of these changes are positive. Teen birth rates last year were down 67% from their peak in 1991. Today’s teens are significantly less likely than their parents to get into car accidents, and they have less of a taste for alcohol.
This is the positive side of what has been, essentially, a drastic fall in actual face-to-face interaction between and among teens. Between 2000 and 2015, the number of kids spending time each day with their friends dropped by 40%. 12th graders in 2015 went out less often than 8th graders in 2009. High schoolers wait longer these days to get their driver’s licenses, and fewer of them take part time jobs to earn a few bucks for themselves.
Rather than date, kids “talk” which is actually a euphemism for sending text messages and Snap-chatting each other. 56% of today’s high schoolers go out on dates compared with around 85% two and three generations ago. So if kids aren’t driving and aren’t dating and aren’t seeing their friends, what are they doing? “They are,” writes Dr. Twenge, “on their phone, in their room, alone and often distressed.”
She reports that the National Institute on Drug Abuse’s Monitoring the Future report - which has surveyed high schoolers since 1975 - finds that all screen related activities make kids more unhappy, while all non-screen related activities make them more happy. Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook can all exacerbate feelings of isolation and being left out. The statistics are devastating. From 2012 to 2015, depressive symptoms in boys increased by 21%. In girls, they increased by 50%. And between 2007 and 2015, twice as many 12 to 14 year old boys and three times as many girls committed suicide.
My daughter Sarah, who brought Dr. Twenge’s work to my attention, explained it to me this way. “The lives of the people I know,” she says, “have become performances. They go on Facebook and their friends are all posting picture of their vacations and the parties they are going to and the food they are eating and my friends ask themselves, ‘Why am I not enjoying life like they are?’ So their own Facebook posts become a performance to convince themselves and others that they are as happy as everyone else seems to be.”
This is obviously a major challenge to parents and to our society as a whole. I am not here to tell you that church or synagogue membership is a cure to the isolation and depression that is at the heart of this problem. But I am here to tell you that this synagogue’s very existence is built on the idea of community involvement and caring; that to live a fully and meaningfully Jewish life requires that you interact personally and directly with others.
This synagogue, in the year just past, offered each of us the chance to put up our sukkah with Larry Hyatt and to put out our candles and challah with Tammy Kahn; to allow a new family observe Pesach, and to allow an old friend say Kaddish; to help Bob Gross bury old siddurim and machzorim and to help Shirley Glasner send out happy birthday or anniversary wishes; to give Jack Huber one last hug and to give Nancy Huber or Mimi Bloch one more hug; to have a slice of lox with the Torah study crowd and to have a slice of birthday cake with Saul Freilich; to explore the meaning of love on Shavuot and to explore the meaning of loss on Tisha B’Av; to plan a celebration with Phyllis Gordon and Sue Burt; to celebrate with Ethan Thomaswick and Josh Rodriguez. Each one of these actions is a mitzvah in the truest sense of that oft misunderstood word. As such, they are not incidental to this synagogue’s existence. They are the very reason for it. To bring your children up as participants in such a community is to necessarily raise their gaze beyond the glow of their smartphone screen.
Some of the things a community asks of its members bring great joy. Others are painful and scary. Each exposes us to a new person or a new experience or a new idea - and so each forces us to grow. And each implants within us a sense of meaning in our lives. That is what Beth Israel is all about. Achieving that is what makes us worthy of the noble designs standing before us.
For all the changes that have taken place in this synagogue over its long history, we have remained a קהילה קדושה - a holy community. We are present for each other and interdependent on one another. As this community has been there for each of us as we have progressed through this lifelong journey of ours, so, with God’s help and our own dedication, may it be there in the lives of our children - to instruct them in their youth, to gain strength from them in their vigor, and to honor them and draw wisdom from them in old age. This is the noble task of our community. Our ancestors’ work, and God’s blessing, have given it to us as an inheritance. For our children’s sake, may this community grow and thrive and be stronger for having been in our care.
Wednesday, September 27, 2017
Sermon for Rosh Hashanah Evening, Beth Israel Synagogue, 1 Tishrei 5778
For the last several years, my prayer book of choice has been The Koren Siddur, edited by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks who was formerly the chief rabbi of Great Britain. What I like most about it is the layout. Rather than large blocks of text, the Hebrew is set as the poetry it truly is. And the English on the facing page mirrors the Hebrew. I occasionally look at the translations just to see how Rabbi Sacks has treated a particular word or phrase. But for the most part, when I pray alone, I pray exclusively in Hebrew.
Praying in Hebrew is different from praying in English. Under Jewish law, prayer is acceptable in any language that one understands. The important thing is to pray with כונה, which is the Hebrew word for intention. For the longest time, I have taken these two requirements together to mean that praying with intention calls for absolute concentration on the meaning of the words one utters. Now I am not so sure. My own מטביע תפילה - my own formula of prayer - seeks to avoid undo repetition, yet words like redemption, rescue, sovereignty, holiness and every possible synonym for praise appear repeatedly. When one says these same words multiple times a day, most every day of the week, concentration on their meaning becomes well nigh on impossible.
But in Hebrew, the actual words matter less. Its the experience of saying them that matters. Hebrew prayer has a trance-like quality to it. Once you have trained your tongue to say the words, they fall from your lips in a natural cadence that can remove you - at least a little bit - from the place where you are physically standing. And it is this sense of removal - this sense of being transported - that I now associate with the requirement of כונה.
Prayer in English is different. Being in our native language, our sensitivity to its nuance is far greater. And this sensitivity is heightened because the prayers are translated not just from a foreign language, but also from a foreign time - one far removed from our own and possessing its own nuance of thought. The translator faces the double challenge of not only capturing the nuanced meaning of the original, but then deciding whether that meaning can even be captured in another language. A simple example is one of my favorite prayers, the one that acknowledges the wondrous nature of the human body which can be found in our מחזורים on pages 82 and 83. It praises God as the One who fashioned האדם with wisdom, creating נקבים נקבים חלולים חלולים. That last phrase literally means “holes that are holes and hollows that are hollow.” Such a phrase would be disconcerting if not outright confusing to most modern worshippers. So instead, our translation renders it “an intricate network of veins, arteries, structures and organs.” Is that what the phrase נקבים נקבים חלולים חלולים really means? Possibly, but it is one of the only translations that can make sense of it. The bigger problem is the word האדם which literally means “the man.” Instead, our translation renders it as “the human body.” No one is going to translate this phrase literally lest one be accused of misogyny. So a text that literally praises God "who fashioned the man with holes that are holes and hollows that are hollow,” becomes “who has fashioned the human body … creating an intricate network of veins, arteries, structures and organs…” And this is a non-controversial example of problematic translation.
The problems inherent in translation mean that translation itself becomes an ongoing process. As the culture into which you are translating a text changes, the translations themselves have to change in order to keep up. This is very different from the experience of Hebrew prayer where texts have changed very little over huge stretches of time. Two years ago, I attended my rabbinical school’s annual retreat. One morning for our prayer service, we used the siddur or Rav Sa’adia Gaon who died 1075 years ago. Virtually everything in that siddur is recognizable to a knowledgeable Jew. While there were differences in phrasing and in word order, what amazes about that prayer book is how little has changed over the course of a millenium.
That is not the case with translations. Just in the course of my lifetime the language of translation has changed dramatically - and I am not referring solely to every “Thou” that has become a “You” and every “Thine” that has become a “Yours.” Starting in the early 1990’s and in response to evolving sensitivities, prayer books have sought to become what is called “gender inclusive.” Ancient texts that referred to the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob have been rewritten to include the matriarchs Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah as well. Other texts that rely heavily on masculine pronouns now get the nouns “God” and “Adonai” in translation. Or they change the translation from third to second person in order to use the neutral pronoun “You” rather than “He.”
For some time I opposed these changes as I felt they corrupted an ancient text. Nevertheless, just raising the issue altered my consciousness of the language of our translations. Now every “He,” “Him,” and “His” evokes in me the fear that someone in the congregation is feeling excluded. So when the closing of Beth El Synagogue in Torrington gave us the opportunity to acquire the newer version of our prayer book - the one with the more gender inclusive language - I grabbed them up. I am not sure how much of a difference these changes make to our congregants, but I do know that they are in line with the direction in which all prayer translation is moving. Indeed, if you look at the title page of the מחזור you are holding in your hand right now, you will see that it is styled the Enhanced Edition. Turn the page and you will learn that the enhancement is the “Expanded Use of Egalitarian English Terminology.”
More revealing of the complications of translation is the מחזור we will be using here on Second Day Rosh Hashanah and the afternoon of Yom Kippur. A word of explanation is in order here. שערי תשובה, Gates of Repentance, is the Reform Movement’s High Holiday מחזור published in 1978. It is produced in the format of the movement’s regular prayer book at that time, שערי תפלה, Gates of Prayer. That prayer book’s most notable feature is that it offers ten separate and distinct Friday night services, ranging from almost traditional to virtually humanistic. I never liked Gates of Prayer which struck me as too scripted. But I did like Gates of Repentance which to me, supplemented the core of the traditional liturgy with meaningful contemporary readings and reflections. In particular, I remember being moved by its Yom Kippur afternoon service - a service which has the potential for great emotional power, which I have long felt has been lacking here. When Temple Beth Tikvah in Madison decided to switch to the Reform movement’s new מחזור, I asked Rabbi Offner if I could have some copies of the older book. She was only too happy to know they might yet be used in worship.
When I sat down this summer to outline our services using that מחזור, it had been twelve years since last I picked it up. I was amazed at how dated it had become. Of course, at nearly forty years old, it predated the move toward egalitarian language by more than a decade. I expected that. But what struck me was the tone of many of the readings. They seemed to be aimed at taking certain messages in our liturgy that were particular to the Jewish people and broadening them to a larger audience. This strikes me as a concern of the Reform movement four decades ago, but not one we share today. Indeed, given how loosely Judaism’s bonds fall on many of our contemporaries, I think we would be more likely today to emphasize the particular over the universal.
Another thing that struck me about this מחזור was how it handled the Holocaust in the martyrology section of the Yom Kippur afternoon service. Written a bit more than 30 years after that time, the readings speak to a generation for whom the Holocaust would be a living memory. That, for the most part, is no longer the case. As formative an experience as that massive tragedy may have been a generation or more ago, it needs to be remembered differently today.
Whether or not Gates of Repentance will enhance our prayer experience here in 5778 is something we will discover over the next ten days. As one of my favorite readings in that מחזור says, “Merely to have survived is not an index of excellence.” So too may it be that all the work of our hands - whether synagogues or sermons or translated prayers - can but serve us a very short while. If there is still life in these forty-year-old translations and interpretations, we will find it together. And if not, we will, hopefully, be none the worse for the experience.
The bigger question I ask myself is what is the value of translated prayer, given how transient they are? Is praying in translation a fools errand - providing only the form of prayer without the כונה that makes it soar? Three things keep me from coming to that conclusion. First, it was through translation was I introduced to prayer. And while I will not - even today - hold myself up as a model to anyone for how to pray, at least I am trying. Second, given my own limitations and flaws, who am I to say what moves and inspires others to the level of intention, introspection and beseeching that prayer requires? And finally, I have learned that, while prayer might be the only path to communicating with God, there are many paths to prayer itself. Study or great triumph may implant in us the desire to pray. Introspection or great tragedy may stir within us the need to pray. And then we will learn for ourselves.
And finally there is this: the belief that, in truth, the language of prayer is neither Hebrew nor English nor, for that matter any spoken language. I believe that the language of prayer is that of the heart. זִבְחֵי אֱלֹהִים רוּחַ נִשְׁבָּרָה לֵב־נִשְׁבָּר וְנִדְכֶּה says the Psalmist - the sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a heart that is broken and contrite. Not, I think, broken in the sense of despairing, but rather in the sense of being broken open - stripped of all its pride and arrogance. Such a heart will reach beyond what it can understand and seek that which it can only sense is there. Whatever can open such a heart - a joy, a pain, a sense of awe, a spoken poem, a wordless song - that is the stuff on which prayer is built. As we enter these days of נוראים - may that sense of awe, of fear, of wonder - open each of our hearts to that truth that stands before us - unseen, but real.
Praying in Hebrew is different from praying in English. Under Jewish law, prayer is acceptable in any language that one understands. The important thing is to pray with כונה, which is the Hebrew word for intention. For the longest time, I have taken these two requirements together to mean that praying with intention calls for absolute concentration on the meaning of the words one utters. Now I am not so sure. My own מטביע תפילה - my own formula of prayer - seeks to avoid undo repetition, yet words like redemption, rescue, sovereignty, holiness and every possible synonym for praise appear repeatedly. When one says these same words multiple times a day, most every day of the week, concentration on their meaning becomes well nigh on impossible.
But in Hebrew, the actual words matter less. Its the experience of saying them that matters. Hebrew prayer has a trance-like quality to it. Once you have trained your tongue to say the words, they fall from your lips in a natural cadence that can remove you - at least a little bit - from the place where you are physically standing. And it is this sense of removal - this sense of being transported - that I now associate with the requirement of כונה.
Prayer in English is different. Being in our native language, our sensitivity to its nuance is far greater. And this sensitivity is heightened because the prayers are translated not just from a foreign language, but also from a foreign time - one far removed from our own and possessing its own nuance of thought. The translator faces the double challenge of not only capturing the nuanced meaning of the original, but then deciding whether that meaning can even be captured in another language. A simple example is one of my favorite prayers, the one that acknowledges the wondrous nature of the human body which can be found in our מחזורים on pages 82 and 83. It praises God as the One who fashioned האדם with wisdom, creating נקבים נקבים חלולים חלולים. That last phrase literally means “holes that are holes and hollows that are hollow.” Such a phrase would be disconcerting if not outright confusing to most modern worshippers. So instead, our translation renders it “an intricate network of veins, arteries, structures and organs.” Is that what the phrase נקבים נקבים חלולים חלולים really means? Possibly, but it is one of the only translations that can make sense of it. The bigger problem is the word האדם which literally means “the man.” Instead, our translation renders it as “the human body.” No one is going to translate this phrase literally lest one be accused of misogyny. So a text that literally praises God "who fashioned the man with holes that are holes and hollows that are hollow,” becomes “who has fashioned the human body … creating an intricate network of veins, arteries, structures and organs…” And this is a non-controversial example of problematic translation.
The problems inherent in translation mean that translation itself becomes an ongoing process. As the culture into which you are translating a text changes, the translations themselves have to change in order to keep up. This is very different from the experience of Hebrew prayer where texts have changed very little over huge stretches of time. Two years ago, I attended my rabbinical school’s annual retreat. One morning for our prayer service, we used the siddur or Rav Sa’adia Gaon who died 1075 years ago. Virtually everything in that siddur is recognizable to a knowledgeable Jew. While there were differences in phrasing and in word order, what amazes about that prayer book is how little has changed over the course of a millenium.
That is not the case with translations. Just in the course of my lifetime the language of translation has changed dramatically - and I am not referring solely to every “Thou” that has become a “You” and every “Thine” that has become a “Yours.” Starting in the early 1990’s and in response to evolving sensitivities, prayer books have sought to become what is called “gender inclusive.” Ancient texts that referred to the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob have been rewritten to include the matriarchs Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah as well. Other texts that rely heavily on masculine pronouns now get the nouns “God” and “Adonai” in translation. Or they change the translation from third to second person in order to use the neutral pronoun “You” rather than “He.”
For some time I opposed these changes as I felt they corrupted an ancient text. Nevertheless, just raising the issue altered my consciousness of the language of our translations. Now every “He,” “Him,” and “His” evokes in me the fear that someone in the congregation is feeling excluded. So when the closing of Beth El Synagogue in Torrington gave us the opportunity to acquire the newer version of our prayer book - the one with the more gender inclusive language - I grabbed them up. I am not sure how much of a difference these changes make to our congregants, but I do know that they are in line with the direction in which all prayer translation is moving. Indeed, if you look at the title page of the מחזור you are holding in your hand right now, you will see that it is styled the Enhanced Edition. Turn the page and you will learn that the enhancement is the “Expanded Use of Egalitarian English Terminology.”
More revealing of the complications of translation is the מחזור we will be using here on Second Day Rosh Hashanah and the afternoon of Yom Kippur. A word of explanation is in order here. שערי תשובה, Gates of Repentance, is the Reform Movement’s High Holiday מחזור published in 1978. It is produced in the format of the movement’s regular prayer book at that time, שערי תפלה, Gates of Prayer. That prayer book’s most notable feature is that it offers ten separate and distinct Friday night services, ranging from almost traditional to virtually humanistic. I never liked Gates of Prayer which struck me as too scripted. But I did like Gates of Repentance which to me, supplemented the core of the traditional liturgy with meaningful contemporary readings and reflections. In particular, I remember being moved by its Yom Kippur afternoon service - a service which has the potential for great emotional power, which I have long felt has been lacking here. When Temple Beth Tikvah in Madison decided to switch to the Reform movement’s new מחזור, I asked Rabbi Offner if I could have some copies of the older book. She was only too happy to know they might yet be used in worship.
When I sat down this summer to outline our services using that מחזור, it had been twelve years since last I picked it up. I was amazed at how dated it had become. Of course, at nearly forty years old, it predated the move toward egalitarian language by more than a decade. I expected that. But what struck me was the tone of many of the readings. They seemed to be aimed at taking certain messages in our liturgy that were particular to the Jewish people and broadening them to a larger audience. This strikes me as a concern of the Reform movement four decades ago, but not one we share today. Indeed, given how loosely Judaism’s bonds fall on many of our contemporaries, I think we would be more likely today to emphasize the particular over the universal.
Another thing that struck me about this מחזור was how it handled the Holocaust in the martyrology section of the Yom Kippur afternoon service. Written a bit more than 30 years after that time, the readings speak to a generation for whom the Holocaust would be a living memory. That, for the most part, is no longer the case. As formative an experience as that massive tragedy may have been a generation or more ago, it needs to be remembered differently today.
Whether or not Gates of Repentance will enhance our prayer experience here in 5778 is something we will discover over the next ten days. As one of my favorite readings in that מחזור says, “Merely to have survived is not an index of excellence.” So too may it be that all the work of our hands - whether synagogues or sermons or translated prayers - can but serve us a very short while. If there is still life in these forty-year-old translations and interpretations, we will find it together. And if not, we will, hopefully, be none the worse for the experience.
The bigger question I ask myself is what is the value of translated prayer, given how transient they are? Is praying in translation a fools errand - providing only the form of prayer without the כונה that makes it soar? Three things keep me from coming to that conclusion. First, it was through translation was I introduced to prayer. And while I will not - even today - hold myself up as a model to anyone for how to pray, at least I am trying. Second, given my own limitations and flaws, who am I to say what moves and inspires others to the level of intention, introspection and beseeching that prayer requires? And finally, I have learned that, while prayer might be the only path to communicating with God, there are many paths to prayer itself. Study or great triumph may implant in us the desire to pray. Introspection or great tragedy may stir within us the need to pray. And then we will learn for ourselves.
And finally there is this: the belief that, in truth, the language of prayer is neither Hebrew nor English nor, for that matter any spoken language. I believe that the language of prayer is that of the heart. זִבְחֵי אֱלֹהִים רוּחַ נִשְׁבָּרָה לֵב־נִשְׁבָּר וְנִדְכֶּה says the Psalmist - the sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a heart that is broken and contrite. Not, I think, broken in the sense of despairing, but rather in the sense of being broken open - stripped of all its pride and arrogance. Such a heart will reach beyond what it can understand and seek that which it can only sense is there. Whatever can open such a heart - a joy, a pain, a sense of awe, a spoken poem, a wordless song - that is the stuff on which prayer is built. As we enter these days of נוראים - may that sense of awe, of fear, of wonder - open each of our hearts to that truth that stands before us - unseen, but real.
Sermon for Yom Kippur Morning, Beth Israel Synagogue, 10 Tishrei 5777
Nine years ago, my daughter Sarah joined her high school swim team and my wife became quite hysterical. No, she wasn’t afraid her baby was going come down with swimmer’s ear. Nor was she perturbed by the thought of spending long weekend afternoons at seemingly endless swim meets, breathing close, chlorinated air while we waited for our child’s two minutes in the pool. What started her crying jag was the fear of what Friday evening swim practices would do to Shabbat dinner.
Sarah only stayed on the swim team for a year, but by then, there were other distractions for a high schooler on a Friday night. Then there was college, and then a job in New York. In the meantime Rachel acquired her own host of young adult interests, all the while this place took up half my Friday nights. And there were friends, and boyfriends, and travel and the other entanglements that lay claim to each of us. The times the four of us welcome Shabbat together are by now so rare that I am actually afraid to try and count.
But one of those rare occurrences took place a few weeks ago and I want to tell you about that night in some detail. That detail, I am afraid, will include some singing on my part, because singing is a big part of Shabbat dinner in my house. But as this is a day when one is supposed to afflict one’s soul, I have no trouble allowing my voice to inflict that affliction on you.
Of course, given the nature and complexity of our lives, even those rare evenings when the four of us share Shabbat dinner together are never quite like they used to be. Its a two hour commute from Sarah’s job to home. And of course, I have my obligations here. So I cooked our Shabbat dinner on Friday afternoon, wrapped it all in aluminum foil, left it on the stove top and headed to Wallingford. After services, I drove into New Haven where I picked up Sarah and her boyfriend Leon at twenty-to-nine. When we got home, I was surprised to find Rachel’s boyfriend Spencer was also joining us. So there would six at our table. Another chair dragged up from the basement, a leaf put in the table and by quarter-passed nine we were ready to go. I watched Terri light the candles at my own table as I had watched Sue Burt light them here hours before. This, of course, is forbidden under Jewish law. When the sun set, it took the time for kindling flame with it. But here’s the thing: you can always hear Terri strike the match to light the Shabbat candles in my house. That’s because in the moment that she strikes it, regardless of how much noise there had been a second before, there is silence. In that moment of silence, Shabbat enters my home. And it doesn’t matter to me where or whether the sun is in the sky.
Then my hands reached for the foreheads of my two girls. I began my blessing upon them with the words ישמך אלהים כשרה, רבקה, רחל ולאה - The Lord make you like Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah. Then I had a choice. Do I proceed with the blessing in the Torah’s actual language, thus referring to my girls with masculine pronouns, or do I modify the text to reflect who they really are? Based on my rather liberal attitude toward candle lighting, you might think I would equally loose with the text. But I am not. When it comes to words of Torah, the pull of tradition is too strong for me. And while rabbis have an equally long tradition of taking liberties with even the Torah text, I am hesitant to do so. So I blessed my girls with masculine pronouns and then kissed them with the right words - שלום לך.
All the while, my pewter kiddush cup sat, brimming with wine, waiting for me to lift it and sing: יום הששי. וַיְכֻלּוּ הַשָּׁמַֽיִם וְהָאָֽרֶץ וְכָל צְבָאָם.. I sang the entire kiddush - beginning with the biblical account of the creation of the seventh day - and I did so very slowly. To be embarrassingly frank, singing over my Friday night table is, to me, like singing in the shower; it sounds much better in my ears then I am sure it does to anyone else. But I savor the words of the kiddush. אֲשֶׁר קִדְּשָֽׁנוּ בְּמִצְוֹתָיו וְרָֽצָה בָֽנוּ - who has made us holy with his commandments and who desires us. In our Hebrew school, I feign anger when one of our kids tells me a מצוה is a good deed. “No,” I tell them for seemingly the hundredth time with a cry in my voice, “its a commandment!” Its our link to God and God desires us. This sentiment is never more palpable to me then in the kiddush.
כִּי בָֽנוּ בָחַֽרְתָּ וְאוֹתָֽנוּ קִדַּֽשְׁתָּ מִכָּל הָעַמִּים For us you have chosen, and us you have sanctified from among all the nations. How antithetical the notion of chosenness has become to so many! It offends our egalitarian sensibilities to no end. I, on the other hand, revel in it; and no more so then when I sing those words on Friday night. The rest of the world stands outside Judaism and when they look in, to the extent they even can, they see an עם קשה ערף, a stiff-necked people, praying to their angry, “Old Testament God.” But a Jew stands inside a covenant whose very purpose is to help her understand that outside world with a caring and compassion that will never be reciprocated. She knows that it paradoxically takes an עם קשה ערף to bring such compassion to a broken world. And she delights in being chosen to do so. I delight in being so chosen, and if I close my eyes when I sing those words, its because in those moments I truly feel how special and important it is to be Jewish.
In a prior iteration of this sermon, I wrote at length about the meal I served. My wife declared that description a wanton act of cruelty inflicted on a people who, throughout its long history and, certainly on this particular day, have suffered enough. Suffice it to say, then, that the meal I served that night was the same meal I serve at every Shabbat dinner. There’s a purpose in the sameness of it all. Like Shabbat itself, its dishes become something you depend on and which form deep and abiding associations in our souls. Shabbat is real because you know it: its look, its smell, its taste, its sounds, its character. But I will come back to this thought in a few moments.
Over dinner we talked as you only can talk among those closest to you; unguardedly and without fear of saying the wrong thing. To me, my kids are the most interesting dinner companions in the world. Part of that is because they are both incredibly smart and incredibly funny. But part of it is because they are the two people in this world on whom I have had the greatest influence, and yet who are entirely their own persons. As the parent of a young child, you tend to think of him or her as a tabula rasa - a blank slate which you fill with knowledge and wisdom and values. But in fact, each child has a distinct personality through which they filter everything you say. And not only do they listen to what you tell them, they watch how you act and they measure those actions against your words. Talking to your kids, then, is a wonderful way of ridding yourself of any illusions you might have as to your own virtue.
On this particular Shabbat evening, our conversation was about the internet: specifically about two books on that subject that Sarah had recommended to me and which confirmed my growing belief that the world wide web is a black hole, sucking the life force out of each and every one of us. I asked my girls and their boyfriends if they were afraid of it all. They answered a patient maturity that would make one wonder who was whose elder. “Of course the internet could be dangerous,” they told me, “but so were cars, subways and public spaces.” But it was also a part of their lives and they treated it with caution, but not fear. Their comments were enough to scuttle my plans for today’s sermon, but not enough to change my mind.
After we wrapped up the leftovers, stacked the plates in the dishwasher and wiped down the table, I reached into what I derisively refer to as “the Jew cabinet” and extracted a copy of the NCSY Bentsher, the little booklet which contains the blessings and table songs one might share over a Shabbat meal. One of my great prides as a parent is that when I opened the cabinet, both my daughters asked for their own copies of the bentsher. And now, with only the half drunk kiddush cup and the half burned down candles glowing on the table, with Terri falling asleep on the sofa and the two boyfriends off doing who-knows-what, my daughters and I sat down and sang. We sang
יוֹם זֶה לְיִשְׂרָאֵל אוֹרָה וְשִׂמְחָה, שַׁבָּת מְנוּחָה.
and
צוּר מִשֶּׁלּוֹ אָכַֽלְנוּ בָּרְכוּ אֱמוּנַי, שָׂבַֽעְנוּ וְהוֹתַֽרְנוּ כִּדְבַר יְיָ.
and
יָהּ רִבּוֹן עָלַם וְעָלְמַיָּא, אַנְתְּ הוּא מַלְכָּא מֶֽלֶךְ מַלְכַיָּא.
Each of those זמירות contains beautiful imagery about Shabbat and the many delights and rewards attached to its observance. But they are, after all, זמירות, songs, and their true beauty comes in being sung - heartily and joyfully. And that is just what we did until we were ready for ברכת.
ברכת המזון - known commonly and mistakenly as the “grace after the meals,” is something of a miracle. It is very long and most people who hear it feel sure they will never master it. But everyone who puts the effort in, does master it and does so remarkably quickly. Perhaps its the prayer’s upbeat style: הַזָּן אֶת הָעוֹלָם כֻּלּוֹ בְּטוּבוֹ בְּחֵן בְּחֶֽסֶד וּבְרַחֲמִים. Or perhaps its the staccato beauty of the words: כַּכָּתוּב, וְאָכַלְתָּ וְשָׂבָֽעְתָּ, וּבֵרַכְתָּ אֶת יְיָ אֱלֹהֶֽיךָ. Or maybe its the delightful wordplay that is obvious to anyone - even those who don’t understand Hebrew: הוּא הֵטִיב, הוּא מֵטִיב, הוּא יֵיטִיב לָֽנוּ. הוּא גְמָלָֽנוּ, הוּא גוֹמְלֵֽנוּ, הוּא יִגְמְלֵֽנוּ לָעַד. Whatever its source, this extended piece of liturgy truly conveys the sense of blessing.
And for me, that night, it conveyed something else. There are two wonderful notions of Shabbat that our rabbis teach which, for me, came together that night. The first is that on Shabbat, we are granted a נשמה יתרה - an extra soul that descends upon us at kiddush and accompanies us through havdalah, doubling our joy on this greatest of days. And the second is that Shabbat gives us a taste of the world to come, that ill defined after-life promised to all whose virtues even slightly outweigh their vices. That evening, around my table, singing the ברכת with my kids, I had a taste of the world to come. It was a world in which my children sang ברכת at their own Shabbat tables with their own children. And I knew that the sense of שלום that they would feel in that moment – that sense of wholeness – was the same sense that I felt in this one. And I knew also that in their moment of שלום, my נשמה יתרה would be there with them.
We live in strange times. How strange? Consider this fact: In my lifetime, men have walked on the moon. But not in my children's. Now this might strike you as an odd quirk of history, but for me, it is deeply significant. When I look at my children's generation, I see that their lives are lived increasingly not in this world, but in a virtual one; in a place where all conceivable knowledge is free, but where wisdom and discernment are as rare as they have ever been. Its a world in which every keystroke they make can be, and for all we know might be, recorded somewhere, and where a single, ill-considered tweet can make them the subject of viscous ridicule, or worse.
At the same time, theirs is a world in which confidence and trust in our society's institutions has fallen precipitously. Trust in the government is at an all time low. The same is true for our economy. And institutions like the colleges and universities, for which many parents mortgage their homes so their children can attend, seem to have lost confidence in themselves, unwilling as they are to defend themselves against the growing anti-Semitism and assaults on free speech on their own campuses.
I look at the world my kids face and wonder: where is the optimism? Where the hope? Where the sense of the ideal?
In giving them Shabbat, I have given my children an ideal made real. The notion of Shabbat as a day of rest is just that - a notion. But my kids know what Shabbat looks like, what it sounds like, what it tastes and smells like, and what it feels like. Shabbat is no disembodied theological concept to them. It is as real to them as my נשמה יתרה is to me.
This is Judaism’s great power: the ability to project an ideal and then, through its prayers and its practices, make that ideal achievable in our lives. It gives a Shabbat dinner the capacity to transport us into the future, just as it gives a Passover Seder the capacity to transport us into the past. It turns a Torah reading into a reenactment of revelation, and a Megillah reading into a reenactment of redemption. Judaism can turn a week spent shivering in a hut into sense of abiding contentment. And it can transform a day’s worth of hunger and contrition into a sense of absolute purity.
Judaism is often said to be a religion of this world, and indeed it is. But it sees this world not with cynicism or fear, but with hope and courage. This is why I believe so strongly that we must rebuild this place. Our children deserve a heritage that fosters their ideals and charges them to do great and good things. And we need to nourish that נשמה יתרה within each of us whose presence fills us with the sense that our lives and our choices matter for they extend beyond ourselves. The challenge is before us. It brims with possibilities. It only remains for us to take it up, to claim it, to nourish it, and to sing its song. The yearning souls of our children, and the yearning souls within each of us, are watching to see what we will do.
Sarah only stayed on the swim team for a year, but by then, there were other distractions for a high schooler on a Friday night. Then there was college, and then a job in New York. In the meantime Rachel acquired her own host of young adult interests, all the while this place took up half my Friday nights. And there were friends, and boyfriends, and travel and the other entanglements that lay claim to each of us. The times the four of us welcome Shabbat together are by now so rare that I am actually afraid to try and count.
But one of those rare occurrences took place a few weeks ago and I want to tell you about that night in some detail. That detail, I am afraid, will include some singing on my part, because singing is a big part of Shabbat dinner in my house. But as this is a day when one is supposed to afflict one’s soul, I have no trouble allowing my voice to inflict that affliction on you.
Of course, given the nature and complexity of our lives, even those rare evenings when the four of us share Shabbat dinner together are never quite like they used to be. Its a two hour commute from Sarah’s job to home. And of course, I have my obligations here. So I cooked our Shabbat dinner on Friday afternoon, wrapped it all in aluminum foil, left it on the stove top and headed to Wallingford. After services, I drove into New Haven where I picked up Sarah and her boyfriend Leon at twenty-to-nine. When we got home, I was surprised to find Rachel’s boyfriend Spencer was also joining us. So there would six at our table. Another chair dragged up from the basement, a leaf put in the table and by quarter-passed nine we were ready to go. I watched Terri light the candles at my own table as I had watched Sue Burt light them here hours before. This, of course, is forbidden under Jewish law. When the sun set, it took the time for kindling flame with it. But here’s the thing: you can always hear Terri strike the match to light the Shabbat candles in my house. That’s because in the moment that she strikes it, regardless of how much noise there had been a second before, there is silence. In that moment of silence, Shabbat enters my home. And it doesn’t matter to me where or whether the sun is in the sky.
Then my hands reached for the foreheads of my two girls. I began my blessing upon them with the words ישמך אלהים כשרה, רבקה, רחל ולאה - The Lord make you like Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah. Then I had a choice. Do I proceed with the blessing in the Torah’s actual language, thus referring to my girls with masculine pronouns, or do I modify the text to reflect who they really are? Based on my rather liberal attitude toward candle lighting, you might think I would equally loose with the text. But I am not. When it comes to words of Torah, the pull of tradition is too strong for me. And while rabbis have an equally long tradition of taking liberties with even the Torah text, I am hesitant to do so. So I blessed my girls with masculine pronouns and then kissed them with the right words - שלום לך.
All the while, my pewter kiddush cup sat, brimming with wine, waiting for me to lift it and sing: יום הששי. וַיְכֻלּוּ הַשָּׁמַֽיִם וְהָאָֽרֶץ וְכָל צְבָאָם.. I sang the entire kiddush - beginning with the biblical account of the creation of the seventh day - and I did so very slowly. To be embarrassingly frank, singing over my Friday night table is, to me, like singing in the shower; it sounds much better in my ears then I am sure it does to anyone else. But I savor the words of the kiddush. אֲשֶׁר קִדְּשָֽׁנוּ בְּמִצְוֹתָיו וְרָֽצָה בָֽנוּ - who has made us holy with his commandments and who desires us. In our Hebrew school, I feign anger when one of our kids tells me a מצוה is a good deed. “No,” I tell them for seemingly the hundredth time with a cry in my voice, “its a commandment!” Its our link to God and God desires us. This sentiment is never more palpable to me then in the kiddush.
כִּי בָֽנוּ בָחַֽרְתָּ וְאוֹתָֽנוּ קִדַּֽשְׁתָּ מִכָּל הָעַמִּים For us you have chosen, and us you have sanctified from among all the nations. How antithetical the notion of chosenness has become to so many! It offends our egalitarian sensibilities to no end. I, on the other hand, revel in it; and no more so then when I sing those words on Friday night. The rest of the world stands outside Judaism and when they look in, to the extent they even can, they see an עם קשה ערף, a stiff-necked people, praying to their angry, “Old Testament God.” But a Jew stands inside a covenant whose very purpose is to help her understand that outside world with a caring and compassion that will never be reciprocated. She knows that it paradoxically takes an עם קשה ערף to bring such compassion to a broken world. And she delights in being chosen to do so. I delight in being so chosen, and if I close my eyes when I sing those words, its because in those moments I truly feel how special and important it is to be Jewish.
In a prior iteration of this sermon, I wrote at length about the meal I served. My wife declared that description a wanton act of cruelty inflicted on a people who, throughout its long history and, certainly on this particular day, have suffered enough. Suffice it to say, then, that the meal I served that night was the same meal I serve at every Shabbat dinner. There’s a purpose in the sameness of it all. Like Shabbat itself, its dishes become something you depend on and which form deep and abiding associations in our souls. Shabbat is real because you know it: its look, its smell, its taste, its sounds, its character. But I will come back to this thought in a few moments.
Over dinner we talked as you only can talk among those closest to you; unguardedly and without fear of saying the wrong thing. To me, my kids are the most interesting dinner companions in the world. Part of that is because they are both incredibly smart and incredibly funny. But part of it is because they are the two people in this world on whom I have had the greatest influence, and yet who are entirely their own persons. As the parent of a young child, you tend to think of him or her as a tabula rasa - a blank slate which you fill with knowledge and wisdom and values. But in fact, each child has a distinct personality through which they filter everything you say. And not only do they listen to what you tell them, they watch how you act and they measure those actions against your words. Talking to your kids, then, is a wonderful way of ridding yourself of any illusions you might have as to your own virtue.
On this particular Shabbat evening, our conversation was about the internet: specifically about two books on that subject that Sarah had recommended to me and which confirmed my growing belief that the world wide web is a black hole, sucking the life force out of each and every one of us. I asked my girls and their boyfriends if they were afraid of it all. They answered a patient maturity that would make one wonder who was whose elder. “Of course the internet could be dangerous,” they told me, “but so were cars, subways and public spaces.” But it was also a part of their lives and they treated it with caution, but not fear. Their comments were enough to scuttle my plans for today’s sermon, but not enough to change my mind.
After we wrapped up the leftovers, stacked the plates in the dishwasher and wiped down the table, I reached into what I derisively refer to as “the Jew cabinet” and extracted a copy of the NCSY Bentsher, the little booklet which contains the blessings and table songs one might share over a Shabbat meal. One of my great prides as a parent is that when I opened the cabinet, both my daughters asked for their own copies of the bentsher. And now, with only the half drunk kiddush cup and the half burned down candles glowing on the table, with Terri falling asleep on the sofa and the two boyfriends off doing who-knows-what, my daughters and I sat down and sang. We sang
יוֹם זֶה לְיִשְׂרָאֵל אוֹרָה וְשִׂמְחָה, שַׁבָּת מְנוּחָה.
and
צוּר מִשֶּׁלּוֹ אָכַֽלְנוּ בָּרְכוּ אֱמוּנַי, שָׂבַֽעְנוּ וְהוֹתַֽרְנוּ כִּדְבַר יְיָ.
and
יָהּ רִבּוֹן עָלַם וְעָלְמַיָּא, אַנְתְּ הוּא מַלְכָּא מֶֽלֶךְ מַלְכַיָּא.
Each of those זמירות contains beautiful imagery about Shabbat and the many delights and rewards attached to its observance. But they are, after all, זמירות, songs, and their true beauty comes in being sung - heartily and joyfully. And that is just what we did until we were ready for ברכת.
ברכת המזון - known commonly and mistakenly as the “grace after the meals,” is something of a miracle. It is very long and most people who hear it feel sure they will never master it. But everyone who puts the effort in, does master it and does so remarkably quickly. Perhaps its the prayer’s upbeat style: הַזָּן אֶת הָעוֹלָם כֻּלּוֹ בְּטוּבוֹ בְּחֵן בְּחֶֽסֶד וּבְרַחֲמִים. Or perhaps its the staccato beauty of the words: כַּכָּתוּב, וְאָכַלְתָּ וְשָׂבָֽעְתָּ, וּבֵרַכְתָּ אֶת יְיָ אֱלֹהֶֽיךָ. Or maybe its the delightful wordplay that is obvious to anyone - even those who don’t understand Hebrew: הוּא הֵטִיב, הוּא מֵטִיב, הוּא יֵיטִיב לָֽנוּ. הוּא גְמָלָֽנוּ, הוּא גוֹמְלֵֽנוּ, הוּא יִגְמְלֵֽנוּ לָעַד. Whatever its source, this extended piece of liturgy truly conveys the sense of blessing.
And for me, that night, it conveyed something else. There are two wonderful notions of Shabbat that our rabbis teach which, for me, came together that night. The first is that on Shabbat, we are granted a נשמה יתרה - an extra soul that descends upon us at kiddush and accompanies us through havdalah, doubling our joy on this greatest of days. And the second is that Shabbat gives us a taste of the world to come, that ill defined after-life promised to all whose virtues even slightly outweigh their vices. That evening, around my table, singing the ברכת with my kids, I had a taste of the world to come. It was a world in which my children sang ברכת at their own Shabbat tables with their own children. And I knew that the sense of שלום that they would feel in that moment – that sense of wholeness – was the same sense that I felt in this one. And I knew also that in their moment of שלום, my נשמה יתרה would be there with them.
We live in strange times. How strange? Consider this fact: In my lifetime, men have walked on the moon. But not in my children's. Now this might strike you as an odd quirk of history, but for me, it is deeply significant. When I look at my children's generation, I see that their lives are lived increasingly not in this world, but in a virtual one; in a place where all conceivable knowledge is free, but where wisdom and discernment are as rare as they have ever been. Its a world in which every keystroke they make can be, and for all we know might be, recorded somewhere, and where a single, ill-considered tweet can make them the subject of viscous ridicule, or worse.
At the same time, theirs is a world in which confidence and trust in our society's institutions has fallen precipitously. Trust in the government is at an all time low. The same is true for our economy. And institutions like the colleges and universities, for which many parents mortgage their homes so their children can attend, seem to have lost confidence in themselves, unwilling as they are to defend themselves against the growing anti-Semitism and assaults on free speech on their own campuses.
I look at the world my kids face and wonder: where is the optimism? Where the hope? Where the sense of the ideal?
In giving them Shabbat, I have given my children an ideal made real. The notion of Shabbat as a day of rest is just that - a notion. But my kids know what Shabbat looks like, what it sounds like, what it tastes and smells like, and what it feels like. Shabbat is no disembodied theological concept to them. It is as real to them as my נשמה יתרה is to me.
This is Judaism’s great power: the ability to project an ideal and then, through its prayers and its practices, make that ideal achievable in our lives. It gives a Shabbat dinner the capacity to transport us into the future, just as it gives a Passover Seder the capacity to transport us into the past. It turns a Torah reading into a reenactment of revelation, and a Megillah reading into a reenactment of redemption. Judaism can turn a week spent shivering in a hut into sense of abiding contentment. And it can transform a day’s worth of hunger and contrition into a sense of absolute purity.
Judaism is often said to be a religion of this world, and indeed it is. But it sees this world not with cynicism or fear, but with hope and courage. This is why I believe so strongly that we must rebuild this place. Our children deserve a heritage that fosters their ideals and charges them to do great and good things. And we need to nourish that נשמה יתרה within each of us whose presence fills us with the sense that our lives and our choices matter for they extend beyond ourselves. The challenge is before us. It brims with possibilities. It only remains for us to take it up, to claim it, to nourish it, and to sing its song. The yearning souls of our children, and the yearning souls within each of us, are watching to see what we will do.
Sermon for Yom Kippur Evening, Beth Israel Synagogue, 10 Tishrei 5777
This past spring I went for my annual physical. After the normal pleasantries, my doctor got down to business. He stared at his computer screen to look at my latest blood work. Soon, a flurry of other windows were opening, including tests and letters from other doctors I happen to see. In a few moments, he turned to me and told me I needed more tests. And I did what I normally do when a doctor tells me he or she wants to look further: I panicked. My doctor, who is truly a mensch, did his best to reassure me, and I did my best to look reassured. But I really don’t handle doctors all that well.
That night, I slept fitfully for a couple of hours. I woke up around midnight and started Googling. By 3 AM, I was a total wreck; scared, exhausted and completely unable to sleep. That’s when I decided to pray. In the dark I stumbled for my glasses, a bathrobe and, finally, a siddur. I prayed slowly and deliberately, lingering over the words. And they brought me comfort. My mind began to settle. In a little while, I put the prayer book down, went back to bed, and fell asleep. A few days later, my doctor called with news that my tests had turned out okay, and mildly upbraiding me for not trusting him more.
I don’t pray ever day, but I do pray most days. My own daily rubric of prayers takes me between 20 and 30 minutes, depending on how fast I go and whether I add prayers here and there along the way, as I often do. I usually, but don’t always, put on my tallit to pray. I rarely use tefillin. But you might be surprised to know that I do use an Orthodox siddur - the Koren Siddur which is relatively new and has a clean, modern style which appeals to me. What I like most about it is that it lays out the Hebrew, not as large blocks of text, but as the poetry it truly is.
As someone who was raised an atheist, prayer has been a struggle for me. It has taken me years to develop a minimal competence as a שליח צבור - a prayer leader - and even that faint praise might be too generous. And it has taken me just as long to develop a true need to pray - a need that transcends temporary wants or anxieties and touches my very being. When I don’t pray, I feel like something is missing in my day. But that said, my prayer is often - perhaps too often - mechanical. I often find myself at the end of a prayer having been barely aware that I had even started it. This, of course, is a far cry from the Talmudic standard which demands a concentration so intense that if a snake curled itself around our feet while we prayed, we wouldn’t take notice. I won’t need many hands-worth of fingers to count how many times I reached that standard of intentionality.
So let’s begin with that - with the recognition that prayer in general, and Jewish prayer in particular - is very hard to do right.
How hard? Recently I spent a Saturday afternoon attending a Catholic Mass at which a friend’s daughter was being married. The entire service, including the wedding, ran to about an hour and a half. There were some hymns and a couple of scriptural readings of little more than a half dozen verses. And, of course, there was communion. The only thing in the service that struck me as anything close to the Jewish concept of prayer was the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer.
Just out of curiosity, I did a word count on that prayer. It came, in its traditional form and including the “amen” at the end, to seventy words. In the course of those seventy words, a Catholic manages to confess submission to God’s will, and asks for sustenance, forgiveness and deliverance. That prayer is shorter than the first of nineteen blessings that constitute the weekday עמידה. The עמידה includes requests for knowledge, repentance, forgiveness, redemption, healing, prosperity, justice, the ingathering of the exiles, the preservation of the righteous, the destruction of the wicked, the rebuilding of Jerusalem and the restoration of the Davidic kingdom. And that doesn’t include the three opening blessings of praise or three closing blessings of acceptance, thanks and peace. In all, the עמידה runs close to 800 Hebrew words, which corresponds to more than 1200 in English. And that is but a single section of the liturgy. I haven’t even touched the שמע or the lengthy blessings that surround it.
For some reason, I have had much less experience with Protestant prayer than I have Catholic. I have had no experience with Muslim prayer. But from what I have learned about both these faith’s practices, neither has anything near the length nor the complexity of Jewish prayer.
The point I am trying to make is that Jewish prayer isn’t merely long and hard. The demands it places on its practitioners are far beyond what is expected in any other faith system with which I am familiar. This might have worked in a shtetl or in a ghetto where a Jew was regularly forced into prayer environments and could absorb its language and habits through osmosis. But once regular synagogue attendance became the exception rather than the rule, and once we raised up a generation of Jews who got their knowledge of Hebrew and prayer in a classroom rather than in a sanctuary, and then expected that generation of Jews to raise up another generation of Jews who would also get their knowledge from a classroom rather than a sanctuary, the hope that we could convey to a majority of our people the great depths of thought and subtle emotional power that our prayers command became became a distant one at best. When we lost the ability to pray comfortably, with knowledge and ease, we also lost the understanding of why prayer is so important to us. So let me take a few moments to tell you why prayer is so important to me.
First of all, I pray because people rely on me to do so. My job puts me in contact with many people who are hurting physically, emotionally or both. I pray for these people, by name, every time I pray. And when I tell them that I do so, they are touched and grateful. Perhaps they believe, I think mistakenly, that my prayers are more efficacious than their own. But I think that for many of these people, that gratitude comes from the knowledge that someone - perhaps on the periphery of their own lives - is taking a moment to recall their suffering and sincerely asking that they be made whole again. Knowing that someone else cares about your pain is, at times, medicine in itself. I often pray just because of this - the sense that I owe these people who are suffering that moment of devotion.
Second, I pray because I feel it my due. I do not believe that I am owed any of the thousands upon myriads of blessings that I enjoy in my life. And heaven forbid that I feel that in praying, I am earning for myself either the continuation of those blessings or the merit of future blessings. I pray, rather, in appreciation of feeling the need to do so. There is, for instance, a prayer one says upon going to the bathroom. It says, in essence, thank you God for all the parts of my body that open when they should and close when they should. Its a prayer like that that has the power to raise at least a few of our many blessings from something we take for granted to something of which we are conscious.
Third - and this is especially true when I pray here - I pray because its fun. I love it when I begin a service with a niggun and people actually join in. I love that I have no idea which tune for לך דודי is going to come out of my mouth until it does. I love that I know four different ways to sing Psalm 150, one more joyous then the next. I love gathering up my ציצית and kissing them during the שמע. I love singing the קדושה and ישמחו and אין כאלהינו and אדון עולם. And when there are, in this place, enough voices to, at least in part, drown out my own, I feel like we must be making a noise that pleases God. And that, to me, is joyous.
As someone who has struggled with prayer, I am working hard to make prayer more meaningful and more accessible to you, my fellow strugglers. Six years ago I streamlined these high holiday services, omitting many of their repetitions on the theory that it is better to say a prayer once with feeling than four times by rote. More recently, I have introduced a once-a-month Shabbat morning service that seeks to bring the full beauty of our most important and extensive liturgy into a brief, three-quarters of an hour. In both of these innovations, I have tried to preserve and present the essence of Jewish prayer in a form that will make people wish to master it and think of it as their own. Mindful of how hard it is to become someone who prays, I am doing my best to ease and broaden our paths into prayer. In this way, I hope to make prayer a part of our lives that we rely on, that we feel is our due, and that brings us joy.
But there is yet another reason why I pray; a reason that surpasses all the others. Indeed, it is to me the very essence of prayer. To try and explain it, I have to take you back to that night last spring when, in exhaustion and fear, I picked up my siddur at three in the morning. What prayers does one say at such times? Its too late for the evening service and too early for the morning. For some reason, I decided to pray the הלל - that collection of Psalms 113 through 118 with which we praise God on our festive days. Our tradition attributes them to King David which would make them around 3000 years old. But on that difficult night, it was as if they had been written just for me. I read מִן־הַמֵּצַר קָרָאתִי יָּהּ עָנָנִי בַמֶּרְחָב יָהּ: - From the narrow place, I called to God. He answered me from God’s wide expanse.
Each of us inhabits a very narrow place. It is a place bounded tightly by a short span of years, but whose walls we veil over so as not to succumb to despair. Then something happens: the veil is lifted, the walls seem to close in on us and we are find ourselves frightened and alone. From that very narrow space we cry out to something beyond ourselves. We cry out to God. We cry out with the same words that David cried out; with the same words that he gave to the scores of generations that cried out between us and him. Those words connect us to those untold generations that came before us, and to the untold generations that will follow us, thus transcending our narrowness. And thus does God answer us from His unlimited expanse. And while it does not change our situation, we in our very narrowness are comforted knowing we have an answer in that which is infinite. We have touched, and have been touched by something transcendent and eternal.
This is why I pray. This is why our prayers are such a precious inheritance. And this is why we must work so hard to reclaim that inheritance. Rebuilding this shul as a modern, vibrant and prayerful community will not be easy. Indeed, doing so will go against some of the most entrenched trends in our society. But doing so will reclaim for us – and more importantly for our children – what is perhaps the most important tool one can possess for building a good and flourishing life: the conviction that that life is not a narrow thing, but has the ability – nay the need - to touch the broadest plains. With God’s help and with your willing patience, we can do this together.
May the Holy One who revealed Himself to our ancestors, grant us the patience and the strength to recover their words of praise and thanks and petition, and make them our own. May He make our prayers a source of comfort to those who need them, a source of reflection in our own lives, and source of joy that binds us all together as one community. And may He, from His infinite expanses, hear our small voices, whispered from our narrow places, and answer us.
That night, I slept fitfully for a couple of hours. I woke up around midnight and started Googling. By 3 AM, I was a total wreck; scared, exhausted and completely unable to sleep. That’s when I decided to pray. In the dark I stumbled for my glasses, a bathrobe and, finally, a siddur. I prayed slowly and deliberately, lingering over the words. And they brought me comfort. My mind began to settle. In a little while, I put the prayer book down, went back to bed, and fell asleep. A few days later, my doctor called with news that my tests had turned out okay, and mildly upbraiding me for not trusting him more.
I don’t pray ever day, but I do pray most days. My own daily rubric of prayers takes me between 20 and 30 minutes, depending on how fast I go and whether I add prayers here and there along the way, as I often do. I usually, but don’t always, put on my tallit to pray. I rarely use tefillin. But you might be surprised to know that I do use an Orthodox siddur - the Koren Siddur which is relatively new and has a clean, modern style which appeals to me. What I like most about it is that it lays out the Hebrew, not as large blocks of text, but as the poetry it truly is.
As someone who was raised an atheist, prayer has been a struggle for me. It has taken me years to develop a minimal competence as a שליח צבור - a prayer leader - and even that faint praise might be too generous. And it has taken me just as long to develop a true need to pray - a need that transcends temporary wants or anxieties and touches my very being. When I don’t pray, I feel like something is missing in my day. But that said, my prayer is often - perhaps too often - mechanical. I often find myself at the end of a prayer having been barely aware that I had even started it. This, of course, is a far cry from the Talmudic standard which demands a concentration so intense that if a snake curled itself around our feet while we prayed, we wouldn’t take notice. I won’t need many hands-worth of fingers to count how many times I reached that standard of intentionality.
So let’s begin with that - with the recognition that prayer in general, and Jewish prayer in particular - is very hard to do right.
How hard? Recently I spent a Saturday afternoon attending a Catholic Mass at which a friend’s daughter was being married. The entire service, including the wedding, ran to about an hour and a half. There were some hymns and a couple of scriptural readings of little more than a half dozen verses. And, of course, there was communion. The only thing in the service that struck me as anything close to the Jewish concept of prayer was the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer.
Just out of curiosity, I did a word count on that prayer. It came, in its traditional form and including the “amen” at the end, to seventy words. In the course of those seventy words, a Catholic manages to confess submission to God’s will, and asks for sustenance, forgiveness and deliverance. That prayer is shorter than the first of nineteen blessings that constitute the weekday עמידה. The עמידה includes requests for knowledge, repentance, forgiveness, redemption, healing, prosperity, justice, the ingathering of the exiles, the preservation of the righteous, the destruction of the wicked, the rebuilding of Jerusalem and the restoration of the Davidic kingdom. And that doesn’t include the three opening blessings of praise or three closing blessings of acceptance, thanks and peace. In all, the עמידה runs close to 800 Hebrew words, which corresponds to more than 1200 in English. And that is but a single section of the liturgy. I haven’t even touched the שמע or the lengthy blessings that surround it.
For some reason, I have had much less experience with Protestant prayer than I have Catholic. I have had no experience with Muslim prayer. But from what I have learned about both these faith’s practices, neither has anything near the length nor the complexity of Jewish prayer.
The point I am trying to make is that Jewish prayer isn’t merely long and hard. The demands it places on its practitioners are far beyond what is expected in any other faith system with which I am familiar. This might have worked in a shtetl or in a ghetto where a Jew was regularly forced into prayer environments and could absorb its language and habits through osmosis. But once regular synagogue attendance became the exception rather than the rule, and once we raised up a generation of Jews who got their knowledge of Hebrew and prayer in a classroom rather than in a sanctuary, and then expected that generation of Jews to raise up another generation of Jews who would also get their knowledge from a classroom rather than a sanctuary, the hope that we could convey to a majority of our people the great depths of thought and subtle emotional power that our prayers command became became a distant one at best. When we lost the ability to pray comfortably, with knowledge and ease, we also lost the understanding of why prayer is so important to us. So let me take a few moments to tell you why prayer is so important to me.
First of all, I pray because people rely on me to do so. My job puts me in contact with many people who are hurting physically, emotionally or both. I pray for these people, by name, every time I pray. And when I tell them that I do so, they are touched and grateful. Perhaps they believe, I think mistakenly, that my prayers are more efficacious than their own. But I think that for many of these people, that gratitude comes from the knowledge that someone - perhaps on the periphery of their own lives - is taking a moment to recall their suffering and sincerely asking that they be made whole again. Knowing that someone else cares about your pain is, at times, medicine in itself. I often pray just because of this - the sense that I owe these people who are suffering that moment of devotion.
Second, I pray because I feel it my due. I do not believe that I am owed any of the thousands upon myriads of blessings that I enjoy in my life. And heaven forbid that I feel that in praying, I am earning for myself either the continuation of those blessings or the merit of future blessings. I pray, rather, in appreciation of feeling the need to do so. There is, for instance, a prayer one says upon going to the bathroom. It says, in essence, thank you God for all the parts of my body that open when they should and close when they should. Its a prayer like that that has the power to raise at least a few of our many blessings from something we take for granted to something of which we are conscious.
Third - and this is especially true when I pray here - I pray because its fun. I love it when I begin a service with a niggun and people actually join in. I love that I have no idea which tune for לך דודי is going to come out of my mouth until it does. I love that I know four different ways to sing Psalm 150, one more joyous then the next. I love gathering up my ציצית and kissing them during the שמע. I love singing the קדושה and ישמחו and אין כאלהינו and אדון עולם. And when there are, in this place, enough voices to, at least in part, drown out my own, I feel like we must be making a noise that pleases God. And that, to me, is joyous.
As someone who has struggled with prayer, I am working hard to make prayer more meaningful and more accessible to you, my fellow strugglers. Six years ago I streamlined these high holiday services, omitting many of their repetitions on the theory that it is better to say a prayer once with feeling than four times by rote. More recently, I have introduced a once-a-month Shabbat morning service that seeks to bring the full beauty of our most important and extensive liturgy into a brief, three-quarters of an hour. In both of these innovations, I have tried to preserve and present the essence of Jewish prayer in a form that will make people wish to master it and think of it as their own. Mindful of how hard it is to become someone who prays, I am doing my best to ease and broaden our paths into prayer. In this way, I hope to make prayer a part of our lives that we rely on, that we feel is our due, and that brings us joy.
But there is yet another reason why I pray; a reason that surpasses all the others. Indeed, it is to me the very essence of prayer. To try and explain it, I have to take you back to that night last spring when, in exhaustion and fear, I picked up my siddur at three in the morning. What prayers does one say at such times? Its too late for the evening service and too early for the morning. For some reason, I decided to pray the הלל - that collection of Psalms 113 through 118 with which we praise God on our festive days. Our tradition attributes them to King David which would make them around 3000 years old. But on that difficult night, it was as if they had been written just for me. I read מִן־הַמֵּצַר קָרָאתִי יָּהּ עָנָנִי בַמֶּרְחָב יָהּ: - From the narrow place, I called to God. He answered me from God’s wide expanse.
Each of us inhabits a very narrow place. It is a place bounded tightly by a short span of years, but whose walls we veil over so as not to succumb to despair. Then something happens: the veil is lifted, the walls seem to close in on us and we are find ourselves frightened and alone. From that very narrow space we cry out to something beyond ourselves. We cry out to God. We cry out with the same words that David cried out; with the same words that he gave to the scores of generations that cried out between us and him. Those words connect us to those untold generations that came before us, and to the untold generations that will follow us, thus transcending our narrowness. And thus does God answer us from His unlimited expanse. And while it does not change our situation, we in our very narrowness are comforted knowing we have an answer in that which is infinite. We have touched, and have been touched by something transcendent and eternal.
This is why I pray. This is why our prayers are such a precious inheritance. And this is why we must work so hard to reclaim that inheritance. Rebuilding this shul as a modern, vibrant and prayerful community will not be easy. Indeed, doing so will go against some of the most entrenched trends in our society. But doing so will reclaim for us – and more importantly for our children – what is perhaps the most important tool one can possess for building a good and flourishing life: the conviction that that life is not a narrow thing, but has the ability – nay the need - to touch the broadest plains. With God’s help and with your willing patience, we can do this together.
May the Holy One who revealed Himself to our ancestors, grant us the patience and the strength to recover their words of praise and thanks and petition, and make them our own. May He make our prayers a source of comfort to those who need them, a source of reflection in our own lives, and source of joy that binds us all together as one community. And may He, from His infinite expanses, hear our small voices, whispered from our narrow places, and answer us.
Sermon for Rosh Hashanah Morning, Beth Israel Synagogue, 1 Tishrei 5777
ברוך המקום, ברוך הוא. ברוך שנתן תורה לאמו ישראל, ברוך הוא.
Blessed be the Omnipresent, blessed be He! Blessed be the one who gave the Torah to His people Israel, blessed be He!
Allow me to begin with an aside. What I am about to say has nothing to do with my sermon topic, but is, rather, an appreciation of the greatness of Torah. The Talmudic sage Ben Bag Bag observed as the reward of continued Torah study, הֲפֹך בָּהּ, וְהַפֵּך בָּהּ דְכֹלָה בהּ - Turn it over and turn it over, because everything is in it. The genius of holding something as an eternal gift from God is that you keeps you turning it over and it keeps you amazed by what you find in it. I have been turning over Torah every Shabbat morning for close to 20 years, and every year I challenge myself to find something new in it. The wonderful members of this community who join me in this study both push me to deepen my own understand of this difficult text and make the task of doing so as rewarding an experience as I have known.
Sometimes, the task of finding something new in a text you have read 20 times before means digging all the deeper into its language. Here we Jews are blessed with thousands of years of written commentary by some of the most brilliant minds who, like us, have turned this text over and over seeking insight, understanding, and the contentment that they bring. But sometimes, indeed more often then not, that new thing for which you are looking is hiding in plain sight - there all along, like a Pokemon - just waiting for you to see it.
Such is the case for me with today’s Torah reading. For as long as I have been reading this text, particularly in the context of this day, I have been focused on its first three aliyot, which tell the story of Abraham’s abandonment of his first son Ishmael. I have always viewed this story as the counterpoint to tomorrow’s reading, Genesis 22 which tells of the binding and near sacrifice of his second son, Isaac. Reading it thus, I have completely ignored the contents of the last two aliyot of today’s reading. These sections deal with dispute over water rights between Abraham and the Philistine chieftain Avimelech. Avimelech’s servants have seized a well that Abraham dug and Abraham wants the well back. He presents Avimelech with seven lambs, whose acceptance of the gift ratifies Abraham’s claim to the well. Hence the place becomes known as באר שבע from the Hebrew words באר meaning well and שבע meaning seven. The well of the seven.
This story touches on a deeper truth about the land of Canaan - the land Abraham’s descendents will inherit and land we call the modern state of Israel. It is a dry land; a land in which water is a precious commodity. This idea is touched on in Deuteronomy as Moses, who will never, in fact, enter the land himself, nonetheless describes it for his people. The land, he tells them, is not like Egypt where the Nile supplies a constant source of irrigation. Rather, the land is completely dependent on the rain that falls upon it in its season. אֶרֶץ אֲשֶׁר־יְי אֱלֹהֶיךָ דֹּרֵשׁ אֹתָהּ תָּמִיד עֵינֵי יְי אֱלֹהֶיךָ בָּהּ מֵרֵשִׁית הַשָּׁנָה וְעַד אַחֲרִית שָׁנָה: - it is a land that the Lord your God looks after continually - God’s eyes are upon it from the beginning of the year until its end. For us, for whom it would never cross our minds to turn off the shower while we soap up, failure to appreciate the preciousness of water is an impediment to understanding Abraham’s dispute with Avimelech over possession of a well.
I drove past Beersheva last December. The city just kind of pops up on you, situated as it is on the edge of the Negev desert. Its home now to 200,000 people and its growing quickly. Israel is developing it as yet another world-wide technology site, this time with an emphasis on cyber-security. Its also sight to major facilities of the Israel Defense Forces and the home of Ben Gurion University.
We drove past Beersheva on our way to S’de Boker, the kibbutz on which Israel’s most noted founding father and first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion lived and is buried. S’de Boker is now the sight of Ben Gurion University’s Zuckerberg Institute for Water Research. There, in one of its laboratories, we witnessed an ongoing experiment in which fish were being grown in various mixtures of fresh and highly treated wastewater. The experiment is showing promising results and if all ultimately goes well, the plan is to use the wastewater generated by the city of Beersheva to farm fish. Imagine that! Farming fish in the desert, on a piece of land which is named for a fight over water rights.
Israel is an extraordinary land in so many ways. But in its championing of water technology, it may well be creating tools that can save the world. This from a land that, from the time of the patriarchs until just a couple of years ago, depended entirely on a good rainy season for its existence. Our prayers reflect this basic truth. From the end of Sukkoth to the beginning of Pesach - the rainy season in Israel - a prayer for rain is part of our daily liturgy. The rest of the year we pray for dew - the only source of water during the summer months. Eighty years ago, the British restricted Jewish emigration to Palestine, condemning thousands if not millions of Jews to death in Nazi concentration camps, partly on the justification that the land's water resources could support no more then two million people. Now it is home to ten million Jews and Arabs and Israel actually exports water intensive crops like melons to the rest of the world. When I was there ten years ago, the water level of the Kineret - the Sea of Galilee - was a part of every newscast. Since that time, Israel has lined its Mediterranean Sea Coast with with a string of desalination plants - one of which is the largest in the world - that collectively provide the country with 785 million cubic yards of potable water per year. The revolution was made possible by technology developed and refined in Israel to make desalination cheap. In a part of the world where all the surrounding countries are parched, Israel actually has a surplus of water.
And desalination is only a part of that story. Since the founding of the state, Israel has treated water as a precious economic good that cannot be wasted. In Israel, every drop of water - even the water that falls on your own private roof - belongs to the state and must be purchased by the end user at its actual cost. This early decision by Israel’s leaders to treat water as an economic good instilled in Israelis a sense of its value. And like all people faced with real economic choices, Israelis didn’t just conserve water, they discovered ways to make it cheaper and go farther.
Israel created drip irrigation which is vastly more water efficient then either sprinkler or flood irrigation. Israel has pioneered the development of seeds and fertilizers that produce more crops on less land and using fewer resources, including water. And - at a time when many major cities are losing a third or more of their fresh water to leaks in their systems - Israel has created a water infrastructure that can trace every drop.
Israel’s mastery of water technology is beginning to change how the world sees this tiny country. Most of the nations of Africa severed their ties to Israel after the Yom Kippur War of 1973. But just this summer, Prime Minister Netanyahu was greeted warmly on a tour of four East African countries. Each of them - and many more across that continent - want something Israel can provide better than any other nation - expertise in confronting terrorism and technology for managing water.
But perhaps the most dramatic example of how Israel’s expertise in water is changing the shape of the world and relations across the Middle East is the Red Sea-to-Dead Sea Conveyance Project. Israel’s neighbor Jordan, with whom it concluded a peace treaty in 1994, is in desperate need of water. But unlike Israel with its long Mediterranean coast on which to build desalination plants, Jordan’s only access to the sea is in the south, at the Gulf of Aqaba. In the meantime, the Dead Sea, the lowest spot on earth relative to sea level, is quickly disappearing as both Israelis and Arabs have diverted water from its source - the Jordan River - into agricultural uses.
There are two major problems the Jordanians face in trying to build a desalination plant on the Gulf of Aqaba. First, the gulf’s ecosystem - filled as it is with many coral reefs - is too fragile to be able to sustain the discharge of highly saline sludge which is the natural byproduct of desalination. Second, Jordan’s population and agricultural centers, and hence the place where it needs the water, are far to the north, around the capital city of Amman. And Amman is a 3000 foot climb from the sea. The need to push that much water that far and that far uphill make the costs of a desalination plant prohibitive.
Enter Israel. Israel has a growing agricultural industry in the desert and can always use more water. So instead of pushing it all uphill, the water from Jordan’s desalination plant will be sent to Israel. Israel in turn will compensate Jordan by allowing it to draw water from the Sea of Galilee, right near Amman. The water will flow through the West Bank and thus increase Palestinian access to fresh water. And that highly saline sludge from the plant? Instead of pumping it into the Gulf of Aqaba, it gets pumped into the Dead Sea to help replenish that struggling body of water.
My visit to the Zuckerberg Water Institute was easily the highlight of my trip to Israel. Driving back, again passing Beersheva, that city where 4000 years ago Abraham struggled to hold on to a single well of water, I needed to share my excitement. I called my father-in-law and told him about all that I had seen and learned. His reaction? “What do you expect from the Israelis?” And then he said something that really got me thinking. He said, “the Israelis understand that human beings are the one inexhaustible resource.”
In a few moments, this service will end and we will all reassemble downstairs to see the model of our proposed renovation of this building unveiled. As David Stein’s long range planning committee has brought us to this point, my own emotions have run the gamut from excitement to terror. On the one hand, revitalizing this building and, more importantly, this community, is the one great goal I have set for myself. On the other, I know that attempting a project this big, this challenging, this daunting may well threaten a community that has achieved a quiet stasis, living modestly off its small inheritance.
Can we achieve the ambitious goals that are about to be put before you all? My more rational brain is quite sure we cannot. The times we live in - times where religious affiliation in general and Jewish affiliation in particular are declining - seem to be against us.
Is it that our parents and grandparents and great grandparents were more pious then we are? I actually don’t think so. I suspect that their willingness to make the sacrifices necessary to build a shul and a Jewish community reflected the constraints the larger community put on them as Jews. This is what we have always done: build for ourselves that which has been denied us by others. It is why this country is filled with Jewish hospitals and Jewish country clubs and Jewish colleges. It is why Jews have been such technological and cultural pioneers - because they have been shut out of all the established paths into our society. It is why the Arab boycott of the nascent State of Israel actually made the country stronger and more powerful.
But these are no longer times when Jews feel particularly marginalized by the larger society. They are, indeed, well wrapped up in it - including its trend toward secularization. For that small number of Jews for whom their religion is a large part of their lives, the tendency is not necessarily to join the shul that is in their town, but to find the one whose practices and programming best meets their needs. A committed Jew in Wallingford cannot be faulted for seeking a spiritual home in the much larger religious communities in places like Hamden or Cheshire.
For all these reasons, then - the seamless integration of Jews into the wider culture, the growing secularism of that culture, and the freedom that religiously committed Jews have to seek out even distant communities - leaves me feeling very dubious that the plans we are about to reveal will ever become anything more then that.
But I cannot help but see in my mind’s eye the skyline of modern day Beersheva. No doubt the desert that surrounds this oasis would look far more familiar to the man who dug its first well which, along with his seven sheep, gave it its name; a city in the middle of the desert that will soon be farming fish.
Blessed be the Omnipresent, blessed be He! Blessed be the one who gave the Torah to His people Israel, blessed be He!
Allow me to begin with an aside. What I am about to say has nothing to do with my sermon topic, but is, rather, an appreciation of the greatness of Torah. The Talmudic sage Ben Bag Bag observed as the reward of continued Torah study, הֲפֹך בָּהּ, וְהַפֵּך בָּהּ דְכֹלָה בהּ - Turn it over and turn it over, because everything is in it. The genius of holding something as an eternal gift from God is that you keeps you turning it over and it keeps you amazed by what you find in it. I have been turning over Torah every Shabbat morning for close to 20 years, and every year I challenge myself to find something new in it. The wonderful members of this community who join me in this study both push me to deepen my own understand of this difficult text and make the task of doing so as rewarding an experience as I have known.
Sometimes, the task of finding something new in a text you have read 20 times before means digging all the deeper into its language. Here we Jews are blessed with thousands of years of written commentary by some of the most brilliant minds who, like us, have turned this text over and over seeking insight, understanding, and the contentment that they bring. But sometimes, indeed more often then not, that new thing for which you are looking is hiding in plain sight - there all along, like a Pokemon - just waiting for you to see it.
Such is the case for me with today’s Torah reading. For as long as I have been reading this text, particularly in the context of this day, I have been focused on its first three aliyot, which tell the story of Abraham’s abandonment of his first son Ishmael. I have always viewed this story as the counterpoint to tomorrow’s reading, Genesis 22 which tells of the binding and near sacrifice of his second son, Isaac. Reading it thus, I have completely ignored the contents of the last two aliyot of today’s reading. These sections deal with dispute over water rights between Abraham and the Philistine chieftain Avimelech. Avimelech’s servants have seized a well that Abraham dug and Abraham wants the well back. He presents Avimelech with seven lambs, whose acceptance of the gift ratifies Abraham’s claim to the well. Hence the place becomes known as באר שבע from the Hebrew words באר meaning well and שבע meaning seven. The well of the seven.
This story touches on a deeper truth about the land of Canaan - the land Abraham’s descendents will inherit and land we call the modern state of Israel. It is a dry land; a land in which water is a precious commodity. This idea is touched on in Deuteronomy as Moses, who will never, in fact, enter the land himself, nonetheless describes it for his people. The land, he tells them, is not like Egypt where the Nile supplies a constant source of irrigation. Rather, the land is completely dependent on the rain that falls upon it in its season. אֶרֶץ אֲשֶׁר־יְי אֱלֹהֶיךָ דֹּרֵשׁ אֹתָהּ תָּמִיד עֵינֵי יְי אֱלֹהֶיךָ בָּהּ מֵרֵשִׁית הַשָּׁנָה וְעַד אַחֲרִית שָׁנָה: - it is a land that the Lord your God looks after continually - God’s eyes are upon it from the beginning of the year until its end. For us, for whom it would never cross our minds to turn off the shower while we soap up, failure to appreciate the preciousness of water is an impediment to understanding Abraham’s dispute with Avimelech over possession of a well.
I drove past Beersheva last December. The city just kind of pops up on you, situated as it is on the edge of the Negev desert. Its home now to 200,000 people and its growing quickly. Israel is developing it as yet another world-wide technology site, this time with an emphasis on cyber-security. Its also sight to major facilities of the Israel Defense Forces and the home of Ben Gurion University.
We drove past Beersheva on our way to S’de Boker, the kibbutz on which Israel’s most noted founding father and first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion lived and is buried. S’de Boker is now the sight of Ben Gurion University’s Zuckerberg Institute for Water Research. There, in one of its laboratories, we witnessed an ongoing experiment in which fish were being grown in various mixtures of fresh and highly treated wastewater. The experiment is showing promising results and if all ultimately goes well, the plan is to use the wastewater generated by the city of Beersheva to farm fish. Imagine that! Farming fish in the desert, on a piece of land which is named for a fight over water rights.
Israel is an extraordinary land in so many ways. But in its championing of water technology, it may well be creating tools that can save the world. This from a land that, from the time of the patriarchs until just a couple of years ago, depended entirely on a good rainy season for its existence. Our prayers reflect this basic truth. From the end of Sukkoth to the beginning of Pesach - the rainy season in Israel - a prayer for rain is part of our daily liturgy. The rest of the year we pray for dew - the only source of water during the summer months. Eighty years ago, the British restricted Jewish emigration to Palestine, condemning thousands if not millions of Jews to death in Nazi concentration camps, partly on the justification that the land's water resources could support no more then two million people. Now it is home to ten million Jews and Arabs and Israel actually exports water intensive crops like melons to the rest of the world. When I was there ten years ago, the water level of the Kineret - the Sea of Galilee - was a part of every newscast. Since that time, Israel has lined its Mediterranean Sea Coast with with a string of desalination plants - one of which is the largest in the world - that collectively provide the country with 785 million cubic yards of potable water per year. The revolution was made possible by technology developed and refined in Israel to make desalination cheap. In a part of the world where all the surrounding countries are parched, Israel actually has a surplus of water.
And desalination is only a part of that story. Since the founding of the state, Israel has treated water as a precious economic good that cannot be wasted. In Israel, every drop of water - even the water that falls on your own private roof - belongs to the state and must be purchased by the end user at its actual cost. This early decision by Israel’s leaders to treat water as an economic good instilled in Israelis a sense of its value. And like all people faced with real economic choices, Israelis didn’t just conserve water, they discovered ways to make it cheaper and go farther.
Israel created drip irrigation which is vastly more water efficient then either sprinkler or flood irrigation. Israel has pioneered the development of seeds and fertilizers that produce more crops on less land and using fewer resources, including water. And - at a time when many major cities are losing a third or more of their fresh water to leaks in their systems - Israel has created a water infrastructure that can trace every drop.
Israel’s mastery of water technology is beginning to change how the world sees this tiny country. Most of the nations of Africa severed their ties to Israel after the Yom Kippur War of 1973. But just this summer, Prime Minister Netanyahu was greeted warmly on a tour of four East African countries. Each of them - and many more across that continent - want something Israel can provide better than any other nation - expertise in confronting terrorism and technology for managing water.
But perhaps the most dramatic example of how Israel’s expertise in water is changing the shape of the world and relations across the Middle East is the Red Sea-to-Dead Sea Conveyance Project. Israel’s neighbor Jordan, with whom it concluded a peace treaty in 1994, is in desperate need of water. But unlike Israel with its long Mediterranean coast on which to build desalination plants, Jordan’s only access to the sea is in the south, at the Gulf of Aqaba. In the meantime, the Dead Sea, the lowest spot on earth relative to sea level, is quickly disappearing as both Israelis and Arabs have diverted water from its source - the Jordan River - into agricultural uses.
There are two major problems the Jordanians face in trying to build a desalination plant on the Gulf of Aqaba. First, the gulf’s ecosystem - filled as it is with many coral reefs - is too fragile to be able to sustain the discharge of highly saline sludge which is the natural byproduct of desalination. Second, Jordan’s population and agricultural centers, and hence the place where it needs the water, are far to the north, around the capital city of Amman. And Amman is a 3000 foot climb from the sea. The need to push that much water that far and that far uphill make the costs of a desalination plant prohibitive.
Enter Israel. Israel has a growing agricultural industry in the desert and can always use more water. So instead of pushing it all uphill, the water from Jordan’s desalination plant will be sent to Israel. Israel in turn will compensate Jordan by allowing it to draw water from the Sea of Galilee, right near Amman. The water will flow through the West Bank and thus increase Palestinian access to fresh water. And that highly saline sludge from the plant? Instead of pumping it into the Gulf of Aqaba, it gets pumped into the Dead Sea to help replenish that struggling body of water.
My visit to the Zuckerberg Water Institute was easily the highlight of my trip to Israel. Driving back, again passing Beersheva, that city where 4000 years ago Abraham struggled to hold on to a single well of water, I needed to share my excitement. I called my father-in-law and told him about all that I had seen and learned. His reaction? “What do you expect from the Israelis?” And then he said something that really got me thinking. He said, “the Israelis understand that human beings are the one inexhaustible resource.”
In a few moments, this service will end and we will all reassemble downstairs to see the model of our proposed renovation of this building unveiled. As David Stein’s long range planning committee has brought us to this point, my own emotions have run the gamut from excitement to terror. On the one hand, revitalizing this building and, more importantly, this community, is the one great goal I have set for myself. On the other, I know that attempting a project this big, this challenging, this daunting may well threaten a community that has achieved a quiet stasis, living modestly off its small inheritance.
Can we achieve the ambitious goals that are about to be put before you all? My more rational brain is quite sure we cannot. The times we live in - times where religious affiliation in general and Jewish affiliation in particular are declining - seem to be against us.
Is it that our parents and grandparents and great grandparents were more pious then we are? I actually don’t think so. I suspect that their willingness to make the sacrifices necessary to build a shul and a Jewish community reflected the constraints the larger community put on them as Jews. This is what we have always done: build for ourselves that which has been denied us by others. It is why this country is filled with Jewish hospitals and Jewish country clubs and Jewish colleges. It is why Jews have been such technological and cultural pioneers - because they have been shut out of all the established paths into our society. It is why the Arab boycott of the nascent State of Israel actually made the country stronger and more powerful.
But these are no longer times when Jews feel particularly marginalized by the larger society. They are, indeed, well wrapped up in it - including its trend toward secularization. For that small number of Jews for whom their religion is a large part of their lives, the tendency is not necessarily to join the shul that is in their town, but to find the one whose practices and programming best meets their needs. A committed Jew in Wallingford cannot be faulted for seeking a spiritual home in the much larger religious communities in places like Hamden or Cheshire.
For all these reasons, then - the seamless integration of Jews into the wider culture, the growing secularism of that culture, and the freedom that religiously committed Jews have to seek out even distant communities - leaves me feeling very dubious that the plans we are about to reveal will ever become anything more then that.
But I cannot help but see in my mind’s eye the skyline of modern day Beersheva. No doubt the desert that surrounds this oasis would look far more familiar to the man who dug its first well which, along with his seven sheep, gave it its name; a city in the middle of the desert that will soon be farming fish.
Sermon for Rosh Hashanah Evening, 1 Tishrei 5777
A
couple of years ago, I made the mistake of speaking off the cuff to
the folks who attend this service. I noted that many of you who are
here at this most lightly attended evening are also the one’s
present ten days from now at ne’ilah, the conclusion of Yom Kippur.
So I referred to you - lovingly, I should say - as the Dead-Enders.
Even though the appellation was meant to be kindly, a number of you
found it insulting and I felt chastened by the experience.
Not
chastened enough, I’m afraid. When Rosh Hashanah rolled around
again last year, I once more spoke off-the-cuff and once more evoked
the Dead End moniker. The reaction was no happier the second time
around.
So
this year, my opening remarks are prepared. But by what name do I
refer to you - my dear friends who will be with me on every step of
this journey from here to the break fast? The rabbi’s loyal
minions, perhaps? The gluttons for punishment? Then I remembered a
passage of Talmud I studied once. It deals with the mitzvah of
lighting the candles of Hanukkah. Now I know most of you have been
doing this forever, but you might never-the-less be surprised by what
the law on this really says.
According
to the Talmud, a man fulfills his obligation to light lights on
Hanukkah - and remember, lighting lights on Hanukkah is a time-bound
positive commandment so only men are obliged to perform it - by
lighting a single candle. But then the Talmud goes on to say that
the מהדרין
-
that is to say, the zealous ones - light a candle for each member of
their household. But then Talmud goes farther, for there are those
who are even more pious in their observance. These the Talmud calls
the מהדרין
מן המהדרין -
the zealots among the zealous. And these folks who follow the ruling
of בית
הלל light
one candle on the first night, two on the second, three on the third
and so on and so on and so on. And that my friends is all of you.
No longer will you be Dead Enders to me. Rather, you are the מהדרין
מן המהדרין -
the zealots among the zealous. The very picture of piety.
Because
you are my מהדרין
מן המהדרין,
I feel an urge to speak more intimately this evening then I do
tomorrow morning or really at any other time outside the concluding
services on Yom Kippur. So indulge me, if you will, if I share with
you a small but personal observation.
The
words “Love ya’” are two of the easiest words to say.
The
words, “I love you” are three of the hardest.
I
made this observation recently as I pondered how I was going to close
an email. I don’t remember the subject of the email and I don’t
remember to whom I sent it. It was probably to one of my daughters,
but it might well have been to a niece or nephew. What I remember
was closing the message with either “love,” or “love ya,” and
knowing that was wrong. It was a throw-away line; one that implied a
serious connection but did so in an unserious way. What I really
meant to say was “I love you.” But at the same time, I was
afraid to do so. One might be able to say “I love you” in an
off-handed way, but you can’t write it that way. When you write
the words “I love you,” you are saying something very serious
indeed. How often do we, in our relationships with others, rise to
the seriousness of what we feel? How often do we let those emotions
go unexpressed, trusting that their object really knows how we feel
without our saying it.
At
the end of Shakespeare’s tragedy King Lear, Edgar, who is
perhaps the story’s greatest hero, says the following as he stands
over all the corpses that have collected around him. He says “The
weight of these sad times we must obey. Speak what we feel, not what
we ought to say.” I think that is good advice for the time we are
in right now. The high holidays need not be a particularly sad time.
But they are weighty times. The weight comes from the notion that
our lives are worthy of examination and critical judgement. Speaking
what we feel can be a great impetus to such examination.
Let
me be clear. When I say that we should “speak what we feel,” I
am talking exclusively about the good stuff; the feelings that we
have that are affirming and positive. The lesson that we should
confront people when they slight or injure us is one that I feel is
too often given and too readily heeded. In the course of a
relationship - the give and take of life - we are often apt to choose
the wrong word or be oblivious to the hurt look, or just careless or
ignorant of our own doings. I don’t want to suggest that these are
acceptable things or that we shouldn’t try to improve our dealings
with others. But I don’t think we can or should live our lives so
involved in our own sensitivities or conscious of those of others
that we lose our spontaneity or subvert our genuine personalities.
So as to speaking what we feel when we are hurt, my advice is,
confront when you must, but suck it up when you can.
But
when what we feel is something affirmative, then I believe we have an
obligation to speak it. These weighty times call on each of us to
take a חשבון
הנפש,
and accounting of our souls. Too often such an accounting focuses on
the failures we have amassed or the debts we have incurred. But a
true accounting requires that we inventory the good as well as the
bad. And I believe it is the appreciation of the good that is within
us that provides the impetus to make ourselves all the better.
Thursday, September 24, 2015
Sermon for Yom Kippur Morning, Beth Israel Synagogue, 10 Tishrei 5776
This
past May, in an outreach effort toward the Jewish community,
President Obama spoke at Adas Israel Congregation in Washington about
the state of relations between the United States and Israel. At the
beginning of his speech, he noted that one of the congregation's
members, Jeffery Goldberg of The Atlantic Monthly, had once
called him the first Jewish president. Mr. Obama happily assumed
this as an honorary title.
I
found this intriguing, so I looked up Mr. Goldberg's article to try
and understand his thinking. He begins it with a funny story. Mr.
Goldberg, it seems, was one of the contributors to The New
American Haggadah which was published three years ago. When he
gave Mr. Obama a copy of the book, the President asked, “Does this
mean we can't use The Maxwell House Haggadah anymore? Mr.
Goldberg refers to this as an Member of the Tribe remark.
Mr.
Obama's sense of humor is not the only evidence he cites to support
his contention that the President is Jewish. In his education at
Columbia University and Harvard Law School, Mr. Obama was exposed to
and taught by more Jewish teachers than any previous American
president. In his political career, not only has he had more Jewish
advisers, they have been among his closest, and they have exercised
considerable influence over the President who apparently does use The
Maxwell House Haggadah at the seven Passover Seders he has
held in the White House. From this, Mr. Goldberg not only learns
that Mr. Obama is Jewish, he learns that he is a traditional Jew; a
Jew more comfortable with the known and well-trodden paths of
American Judaism; the kind of Jew you would expect to find inhabiting
a retirement community in Boca Raton.
Well,
I don't know the types of Jews to which Mr. Goldberg was exposed as a
child, but where I came from, Mr. Obama could only be taken for one
thing: a goy. And therein lies the subject I want to discuss
with you today; the subject of Jewish identity. What is it that
makes us Jewish?
Let
me begin with a word of cautious clarification. The object of this
story was not Barack Obama, it was Jeffery Goldberg. The President,
I believe, as a black man, feels a deep empathy for the Jews in the
same way that Jews, fifty-years ago, became prominent in the Civil
Rights movement. Mr. Obama makes no claims of being Jewish. He seems
to have enough trouble getting certain people to believe he is a
Christian. It is, rather, Jews like Mr. Goldberg who make the claim.
Which leads me to wonder: what do Jews think being Jewish means
anymore?
This
is a very large question; one that cannot be done full justice in the
course of a short – or even very long – sermon. But I believe it
a vital question for us right now. On Rosh Hashanah, I asked us to
dedicate ourselves to rebuilding this synagogue – a new entryway, a
new sanctuary, a new social hall, new classrooms – perhaps even a
mikvah. This would be an enormous and risky challenge for us. We
should undertake this challenge, I suggested, to make this place
vital and exciting again – a place where people want to come
together to learn and pray and eat and argue and live in a rich,
rewarding Jewish community. It all sounds wonderful and I am sure
even the doubters among us would love to see this place crowded and
thriving again. But to make
that happen, you have to be able to answer the question, why be
Jewish? What does being Jewish mean? What makes Jews different?
Jews
used to be different because we lived differently. We spoke Yiddish,
we ate kosher, we had weird holidays that involved strange rituals
like throwing out our bread or building little booths for ourselves,
and which seemed to creep up on us, sporadically. All of that is a
shadow of what it once was. As Jews have become fully integrated
into American society, we are looking more and more for universal
messages from our religion – the things that make us more like
everyone else. You can see this in the evolution of the idea of
mitzvah. Ask virtually any Jew what a mitzvah is and he or she will
tell you its a good deed. Gone is the idea of commandment which
implies a particular responsibility performed as part of a
relationship – a covenant.
But
the covenantal relationship not only connects a Jew to God, it
connects her to her community. If we are going to rebuild this
synagogue and with it this Jewish community, we are going to have to
become comfortable again with the idea of a Jewish covenant and the
particularism that implies. In other words, we are going to have to
get used to the idea that Jews are – in important ways –
different from everyone else. To me, this is not a theoretical
proposition, it is a simple fact. In trying to understand this fact
for myself, my thoughts have focused on three ways in which Jewish
identity is inevitably different from that of our neighbors. First,
we live in a different place from everyone else. Second, we live
with a different sense of time and personal identity than everyone
else. And finally, these profound differences in our understanding
of place and time impress upon us an equally profound sense of
purpose that is different from everyone else. Let me try to explain.
When
I say that we live in a different place from other people, of course
I mean this metaphorically. What I mean to say is that Jews
constantly have before us both a vision of the real world in which we
live and an ideal world which we need to build. The place we live in
is somewhere in the middle, and we are constantly negotiating between
the two, never quite sure in which we want to be.
This
strange limbo comes directly from our relationship with Torah. To
us, Torah is sacred – the unchangeable, immutable word of God. To
question the sanctity of a single letter – let alone a word or
phrase or commandment – is absolutely forbidden. Yet as my friend
Ken Burt, one of my most devoted study partners and himself a
Catholic is constantly asking me, “Is this really where you want to
be?” Let me illustrate his point. Torah prescribes the death
penalty for something like two dozen different offenses including
blasphemy, sabbath breaking and cursing a parent. Yet when we
actually look at how Jewish law is carried out, we discover that the
death penalty is virtually never imposed. Our tradition teaches that
a rabbinic court that passed down a single death sentence every 70
years was considered blood-thirsty. Caught between the Torah's
demands and the real world in which we live, we have sided with the
real world – all the while insisting that in doing so, we are
honoring the Torah's sanctity. And this is but one example of the
thousands of interpretive liberties that Jews have taken with the
Torah – all done in the name of being true to its message. So
convinced are we that kol
n'teevotekhah shalom
– all of its ways are ways of peace – that we will not rest until
they have found the decency and humanity in even the most challenging
of its pronouncements.
This
ability to, on the one hand declare something immutable and
unchangeable and, on the other, to change it, may sound like madness.
It is, in fact, our peculiar genius. It has cultivated within us
the attributes that have made Jews so successful in so many
endeavors. On the one hand, it has developed our skills of deep
analysis and creative thinking as we try to negotiate between the
worlds that surround us. On the other hand, it has ingrained in us
an incessant dissatisfaction with our choices which is the essential
spur to achievement. Is it any wonder, then, that Jews have so
greatly succeeded in virtually every academic and artistic field?
And is it any wonder that Jews have practically defined American
humor – infecting it with the strong sense of irony and neurosis
that are themselves the byproducts of feeling oneself forever caught
in the middle?
This
strange sense of place that I believe is the essential element that
makes Jews different, is enhanced by another sense that is equally
weird: our sense of identity. The old joke that seeks to summarize
every Jewish holiday in three simple sentences captures the essence
of this weirdness: They tried to kill us. We won. Let's eat. The
weirdness comes from the pronouns: us and we. Jews have a peculiar
ability to see the world not in terms of “I” and “mine” but
of “we” and ours.” This is not due to some inherent generosity
that makes Jews more selfless then other people. Far from it. Jews
can be as avaricious as anyone. It comes, rather, from the way our
tradition demands that we see ourselves. Think about all the einus
and ahnus
in our prayers as in ahnu
amechah or
eloheinu
v'eilohey avoteinu.
Each one of those is a we or an our. Even on this Day of Atonement,
our lengthy confessions of sin are all in the first person plural.
But
the truly cool thing about this collective identity of ours is that
it travels through time. We learn in both The
Maxwell House
and The New
American Haggadah
that every Jew needs to see him or herself as coming out of Egyptian
slavery. We were there when we were led out of slavery, and we were
there when we were marched into captivity. We were there with the
Maccabees, and we were there on Masada. We were expelled from Spain
in 1492, and emancipated in France in 1791. We were on the boats
that landed in this country at the turn of the last century, and on
those that were turned away 40 years later. We were dancing in the
streets of Tel Aviv in 1947, and were crying at the Wall in 1967.
The way we pray, the way we talk about history, the way we think
about ourselves as part of the covenant all evokes a single message:
that each of our lives compasses all of Jewish history. And that is
the real point here: because all of Jewish history takes in not only
the past, but the future as well. This peculiar sense of Jewish
identity teaches us that the past is ours to draw on as we shape the
future that is in our hands.
These
two great differences – our altered sense of place and time –
leave a deep impression on us, leading to yet a third difference –
the belief that being Jewish really matters to who we are. Down
through history, many Jews have decided they do not want to be
different and therefore have left Judaism, one way or another. But
those that remain – whether they embrace their Judaism or are
hostile to it – do so because they are, in some ways, marked by
their faith. I remember when I was in college talking to a casual
acquaintance with whom I had no religious connection when one of us
dropped a coin. “That sounds like a dime,” he said. “How can
you tell,” I asked, a bit incredulous. He shook his head at me and
gave me a wry smile. “I'm Jewish,” he replied, thus embracing a
dubious stereotype as part of his identity.
To
be a Jew in this country is to be one person in 50. To be a Jew in
this world is to be one in 50,000. For those who do not consciously
cast their faith away, the sheer improbability is often enough to
give us pause. So long as being Jewish means being different and so
long as that difference retains the vitality it had for their
ancestors, they will see their being Jewish as something meaningful.
And if their Judaism is meaningful, then their lives must be
meaningful as well. Finding meaning is the greatest quest each of
us.
My
concern with defining how Jews are different, may strike some of you
as exclusionary. If it does, I urge you to come to Torah study one
Shabbat morning. Around our large table you will find quite as many
Christians as Jews, studying together and learning from each other.
The Christians are not there because they want to convert. Far from
it. They are there because they find that that atmosphere – where
we all struggle to find the sanctity in what are often very difficult
texts, and where the voices of thousands of years of Jewish thinkers
echo in our very modern ears – is something unique and precious;
something they cannot find in their own churches, but something that
adds sanctity to their lives. In other words, we become closer to
our neighbors not by hiding our differences, but by sharing them.
I
was raised an atheist in a thoroughly Jewish home – a home filled
with Yiddishkeit. The Yiddishkeit alone, though, was enough to
convey to me those things that make Jews different. The concern for
the health of our society which was a constant subject in our home,
and the deep sense of irony though which all my elders seemed to look
at the world, taught me to measure what there is against what there
might be. Concern for the plight of Russian Jews and the safety of
the State of Israel turned my attention from “me” to “we.”
And the prevalence of playground antisemitism made me believe I was
a Jew for a reason. When it came time to make my own home, to raise
my own family, I knew the Yiddishkeit I could bring to it would
inevitably be a lower cholesterol version. It would not be enough to
convey to my children that which makes us different – that which
makes us Jewish. And so I found myself turning to Torah. Etz
hayyim he lamah khazikim bah
– it is a tree of life to those who grasp it. What I learned in
grasping Torah was not a substitute for Yiddishkeit – for the
Jewishness of my youth. It is Yiddishkeit, Jewishness, itself. It
is the thing that defines us, it is the thing that can sustain us.
It is the thing around which we need to rebuild.
I
want to rebuild this place, I want to make it new again, I want to
see it grow again because I want every Jew that enters its doors to
want to be – and love being – distinctly Jewish. I want us
together to delight in this beautiful, complex and weird world of
ours that demands our imagination to understand it, our sense of
irony to cope with it, and our passion to make it better. I want us
to feel the weight of our history – a powerful history that has
known humankind's greatest heights and deepest depths. I want us to
engage meaningful in our own times, driven by the sense of a bond
that links every individual Jew into a “we” and an “us” and
an “our.” And I want us to shape the future together, confident
that we will, somehow, be present for every moment of it, as we have,
somehow, been present in every moment up to now. In doing so, we
will teach and reteach to each other the profound truth that every
one of our lives not only matters, but is of infinite importance.
As
to Barack Obama, perhaps in his post-Presidential years he will
choose to make his honorary Jewishness official. To which I can only
say that I would be honored to help him prepare for his conversion.
He already seems to have the humor down. I suspect that, along with
the aleph-bet, and with him being a politician, it is the “we”
versus “me” part that will need the most work. But then he can
take a dunk in our new mikvah and become someone different.
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